University of Minnesota

Dr. Butler is a Professor of Physics at the University of Alabama. His previous leadership experience includes serving as the director of the Center for Materials for Information Technology, at the University of Alabama from 2001-2010, and as director of an NSF Materials Science and Engineering Center from 2001-2010. He was also the leader of the theory group at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) from 1985-2001, and served as a member of the research staff at ORNL from 1972-2001. He was also an Assistant Professor at Auburn University from 1969-1972. His awards include the USDOE award for Outstanding Research, the USDOE award for Outstanding Sustained Research, and the National Institute for Materials Science Award for prediction/invention of symmetry-based spin filter effect [1]. This effect forms the basis of most of the spintronics devices in use today. He has also developed approaches to the design of half-metallic heterostructures which makes it possible to engineer materials with tunable characteristic properties [2-3] and has made contributions to the modeling of perpendicular spin-torque devices [4-6]. His industry interactions include projects with Seagate, Western Digital, Fujitsu, Grandis, and Samsung.

1.	W. H. Butler, X.-G. Zhang, T. C. Schulthess, and J. M. MacLaren, “Spin dependent tunneling conductance of Fe|MgO|Fe sandwiches,” Phys. Rev. B 63, 054416 (2001).
2.	C.A. Culbert, M. William, M. Chshiev and W.H. Butler, “Half-metallic L21 structures with (001) planar insertions," J. Appl. Phys. 103, 07D707 (2008).
3.	W.H. Butler, C.K.A. Mewes, C. Liu, and T. Xu, “Rational design of half-metallic heterostructues," arXiv: 1103.3855v1, 2011.
4.	W. H. Butler, T. Mewes, C. Mewes, P. Visscher, W. Rippard, S. Russek, R. Heindl, “Switching distributions for perpendicular spin-torque devices within the macrospin approximation,” IEEE Trans. on Magn. PP, 1 (2012).
5.	M. Kamaram, W. H. Butler, and A. W. Ghosh, “A quasi-analytical model for energy-delay-reliability tradeoff studies during write operations in a perpendicular STT-RAM cell,” IEEE Trans. Elect. Dev. 59, 2221 (2012).
6.	E. Chen, D. Apalkov, Z. Diao, et al., “Advances and future prospects of spin-transfer torque random access memory,” IEEE Trans. Magn. 46, 1873 (2010).