Prof. Randall Victora Received IEEE Magnetics Society Achievement Award
Prof. Randall VictoraThe IEEE Magnetics Society honors one of its outstanding members each year for his or her lifetime professional achievement. This is the highest award of the Society and is given for scientific, technical achievements and service to the Society. The award is presented at the INTERMAG conference each year, and consists of a diploma with citation and a cash prize.
Randall H. Victora receives the 2014 Achievement Award for “contributions to the theory and simulation of magnetic materials, particularly magnetic recording media.”
Prof. Victora is widely recognized for contributions in three major areas, each corresponding to a different decade in his research career. In 1987, he published the first paper to demonstrate accurate predictions of hysteresis loops and switching fields for coercive materials, such as recording media, without the benefit of adjustable parameters. He employed techniques such as division of thin films into grains, internally discretized grains linked by exchange, periodic boundary conditions for treatment of magnetostatics, and numerical integration of the Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert equations. In the 1990s, Prof. Victora mostly worked on superlattice media, originally for magneto-optical recording, ultimately for magnetic recording. He was one of the first researchers to make first-principle predictions for magnetic anisotropy and magnetooptic effects.
Most recently, Prof. Victora published an approach for combining hard and soft materials within the same grain so that the thermal stability of the hard layer was retained, but a smaller magnetic field was necessary for high frequency switching. Exchange-coupled composite (ECC) media presented obvious advantages for a magnetic recording industry facing the superparamagnetic limit. Versions of it have appeared in numerous commercial products. It was recognized by an INSIC Technical Achievement Award in 2006, shortly after its initial publication. Prof. Victora is one of only two individuals to have ever received two separate Technical Achievement Awards from the Information Storage Industry Consortium (INSIC); Neal Bertram is the other.
Prof. Victora received his B.S. in Physics and B.S. in Math from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1980 and his Ph.D. in Physics from U.C. Berkeley in 1985. Subsequently, he was a Senior Research Scientist and Research Associate at Kodak Research Laboratories (1985-1998) before becoming Associate Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Minnesota (1998-2001). From 2001 to present, he has been Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Minnesota, where he is Director of the Center for Micromagnetics and Information Technologies (2003-present) and Director of Graduate Studies (2011- present). Prof. Victora has also served as President of the IEEE Magnetics Society(2009-2010).
Prof. Victora joins a distinguished list of past recipients: Fred Luborsky 1981, Herb Storm 1982, Harold Lord 1984, Joe Suozzi 1985, Fritz Friedlaender 1986, Andrew Bobeck 1987, Floyd Humphrey 1988, Paul Biringer 1989, Daniel Gordon 1990, Emerson Pugh 1991, Yoshifumi Sakurai 1992, William Doyle 1993, Richard Barker 1994, Mark Kryder 1995, Koosuke Harada 1996, Gordon Slemon 1997, Stan Charap 1998, Dave Thompson 1999, Denis Mee 2000, Fred Hagedorn 2001, Sun-ichi Iwasaki 2002, Carl Patton 2003, Yutaka Sugita 2004, Robert Fontana 2005, Neal Bertram 2006, John C. Mallinson 2007, Jack H. Judy 2008, Roger Wood 2009, Isaak Mayergoyz 2010, Jian- Gang (Jimmy) Zhu 2011, John Slonczewski 2012 and Michael Mallary 2013.
