Albert Fert

Albert Fert is a French physicist, born in 1938, recognized as one of the discoverers of giant magnetoresistance, which he discovered in 1988, a breakthrough that enabled gigabyte hard disk drives and helped establish the field of spintronics. He is an emeritus professor at Paris-Saclay University in Orsay, scientific director of a joint CNRS and Thales laboratory, and an adjunct professor at Michigan State University. He received the Japan Prize in 2007 and the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2007, shared with Peter Grunberg. He received the Wolf Prize in Physics in 2006.