Prof. Albert FertNobel Laureate 2007 - Physics, France
Professor Albert Fert graduated from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Paris in 1970. He has been professor of physics at the University of Paris-Sud since 1976. Professor Fert is currently the scientific director of a joint laboratory of the French National Center for Scientific Research and the company, Thales.
Professor Fert’s experimental (and theoretical) research is in the field of condensed matter physics (metals, magnetism, spintronics). He was one of the co-discoverers of giant magneto-resistance in 1988. This discovery led to multiple applications, in particular to hard discs of very large capacity, and triggered the development of the research field which is now called spintronics. Professor Fert has made important contributions to the development of this field, publishing more than 300 scientific articles. One of the publications currently has over 4000 citations and, in 2003, was in the “top ten” of the ten most cited articles published by Physical Review Letters (PRL) during the first 50 years of the letter journal.
Together with Professor Peter Grünberg, Professor Fert was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics for the independent co-discovery of giant magneto-resistance (GMR). Professor Fert has received a number of other awards including the American Physics Society International Prize for New Materials (1994), the Grand Prix de Physique Jean Ricard of the French Physical Society (1994), the Europhysics Prize (1997), the CNRS Gold Medal (2003), the Wolf Prize (2006) and the Japan Prize (2007). He was elected to the French Academy of Sciences in 2004.
