Mar 27 2013
Honeywell today introduced Professor Albert Fert , Nobel laureate in Physics, to the students and faculty of VSB-Technical University in Ostrava as part of its global Honeywell Initiative for Science & Engineering (HISE) program.
Professor Fert is among 22 Nobel laureates that Honeywell has sponsored at universities worldwide since 2006. The event marks the sixth time a Honeywell program has been delivered to a university in the Czech Republic, benefiting thousands of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) students and teachers across the country.
Fert was awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of Giant Magnetoresistance (GMR), making him one of the pioneers of the digital revolution. GMR brought about a breakthrough in gigabyte hard disks, enabling tremendous advances in computer memory by allowing DVDs and other disks to store enormous amounts of data.
With more than 1,000 students in attendance, Fert delivered a lecture on the fundamentals of spintronics, which is a field of science that has arisen from his work on GMR. Spintronics is used for quantum information processing as well as for read heads in computer hard drives.
"We will soon be seeing new applications for spintronics," Fert said. "These include new types of computer memories that have a significant reduction in energy consumption, as well as new applications for radio-wave devices in telecommunications."
Students engaged in a lively discussion after the talk and interacted directly with the professor during his visit.
"We are delighted to host HISE and Professor Fert for this two-day event," said VSB-Technical University Rector Ivo Vondrak . "By providing our students the opportunity to interact and learn directly from a Nobel laureate, we hope to energize and inspire tomorrow's great leaders in engineering and science."
"As a company that invents and manufactures leading technologies, our passion is to pursue innovative ways to make the world safer and more secure, and more comfortable and energy efficient," said Karl-Heinz Bauer , CTO, Honeywell Transportation Systems. "It is important for us to connect students to STEM-related careers so they can tackle the global challenges that all of us will face in the future."
Source: http://honeywell.com/