Magnetoelectric phenomena and devices

• Dr Neil D Mathur, University of Cambridge, UK

Biography to follow 

• Professor James Scott FRS, University of Cambridge, UK

Biography to follow 

• Professor Nicola Spaldin, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
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Biography

Nicola Spaldin is Professor and Chair of Materials Theory at the ETH Zurich. Research in her group combines first-principles and phenomenological theoretical techniques to study the fundamental physics of novel strongly correlated materials with contraindicated co-existing functionalities.  Her current scientific hobbies include using magnetoelectrics to explore basic questions in high energy physics and cosmology, and building a facility for float zone growth of oxide single crystals.  When not in the lab. she is usually climbing or skiing in the Alps or playing Chamber Music. 

• Professor Craig Fennie, Cornell University, USA
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Biography

Craig Fennie is currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Applied and Engineering Physics at Cornell University. He received his BEE and MSEE degrees from Villanova, and his PhD in theoretical condensed matter physics from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey in 2006, working in the group of Prof. Karin Rabe. Upon graduation, he was awarded the Nicholas Metropolis Fellowship from Argonne National Laboratory. Since June 2008 he has been faculty at Cornell University, where he continues working in the field of multifunctional materials-by-design, specifically on the application of first-principles methods to understand and to discover new ferroelectrics, multiferroics, and other materials for oxide electronic devices. He is the recipient of the 2010 Young Investigator Award from the Army Research Office, the 2011 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation, and the 2012 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). 

• Dr Meera Parish, University College London, UK
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Biography

Meera Parish is a lecturer at the London Centre for Nanotechnology, University College London. She obtained her Bachelor of Science (Honours) degree from the Australian National University, and subsequently went on to complete a PhD in theoretical condensed matter physics at the University of Cambridge. To further broaden her horizons, she then spent 3 years as a postdoctoral fellow in the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science at Princeton University, before returning to Cambridge in 2009 to take up an EPSRC Career Acceleration fellowship. Her research to date has focussed on two areas of condensed matter physics: (1) quantum coherence phenomena such as superfluidity and superconductivity, and (2) the effective response of classical random media. She is currently building a programme of interdisciplinary theoretical research on strongly correlated phenomena that bridges the fields of atomic gases and unconventional superconductors. In 2012, she was awarded the IOP Maxwell medal and prize for her achievements.

• Professor Tsuyoshi Kimura, Osaka University, Japan
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Biography

Dr. Tsuyoshi Kimura is a Professor in Graduate School of Engineering Science at Osaka University. He received his B.Eng. degree in Synthetic Chemistry from University of Tokyo in 1991 and his Ph.D degree in Superconductivity from University of Tokyo in 1996. From 1996 to 2000, he was at Joint Research Center for Atom Technology in Tsukuba as a postdoctoral fellow. Subsequently, he was a lecturer at Department of Applied Physics in University of Tokyo between 2000 and 2003. He worked as a Limited Term Staff Member from 2003 to 2005 in Los Alamos National Laboratory and as a Member of Technical Staff in Bell Laboratories from 2005 to 2007. Dr. Kimura has extensive research experience in the single-crystal growth of transition-metal oxides and in the characterization of structural, magnetic, and electric properties of these materials. He found several fascinating functionalities such as giant magnetoelectric effects in some multiferroics, and has authored/ co-authored over 150 refereed original papers, 40 proceedings, and 3 review papers, with total citation of over 10,500.  

• Professor Sang-Wook Cheong, Rutgers, USA
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Biography 

Sang-Wook Cheong has published about 600 scientific papers, and the total citation is more than 30,000 (four papers cited more than 1000 times, and his h-index is 86). His educational background includes mathematics in college, string theory (about three years) in graduate school, and solid state physics for Ph. D. He has worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory, AT&T Bell Laboratories, and Rutgers Center for Emergent Materials (RCEM), Rutgers. He is currently the director of RCEM, a Board of Governors Professor at Rutgers, and a Distinguished Professor at Postech, Korea. His work on multiferroics has been recognized through various prizes, including the 2007 Hoam Prize sponsored by Samsung, the KBS 2009 Global Korean Award, and the 2010 James C. McGroddy Prize for New Materials sponsored by IBM. 

• Professor Manfred Fiebig, ETH Zurich, Switzerland

Biography

Manfred Fiebig is Professor for Multifunctional Ferroic Materials in the Department of Materials at the ETH Zurich. His main research topic are systems with strong electronic correlations which he probes by nonlinear laser-optical techniques. Particular fields of interest are magnetoelectric interactions in systems with multiple ferroic order and ultrafast magnetization processes. Manfred Fiebig received his PhD in 1996 from the University of Dortmund in Germany. From 1997 to 1999 he worked on in the Department of Applied Physics at the University of Tokyo as a Fellow of the Japan Science and Technology Corporation. Following an intermission at the University of Dortmund from 1999 to 2001 he moved to the Max Born Institute of Nonlinear Optics and Short Pulse Spectroscopy in Berlin in 2002 as Heisenberg Fellow of the DFG. From 2006 to 2011 he worked as professor at the Helmholtz Institute for Radiation and Nuclear Physics at the University of Bonn. From there he was appointed to the ETH Zurich in 2011 where he has been working since then. 

• Dr Finlay Morrison, St Andrews, Scotland
• Audio recording (mp3)

Biography

Finlay Morrison is a Royal Society University Research Fellow and Reader in Chemistry at the University of St Andrews. His interest lies in the solid state chemistry of functional oxides both in bulk and thin film. His research focuses on investigation and development of new materials, particularly dielectrics and ferroelectrics. Finlay was educated at the University of Aberdeen where he received his B.Sc  in Chemistry, M.Sc. in New Materials, and PhD in solid state chemistry (1999). He then held PDRA positions in the Engineering Materials Department, University of Sheffield (1999-2001) and Earth Sciences Department at Cambridge (2001-2004). In 2004 he was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship which he initially held at the University of Cambridge before joining the School of Chemistry at St Andrews in 2006.  

• Professor J Marty Gregg, Queen's University Belfast, Northern Ireland
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Biography

JM Gregg obtained both his primary degree (1991) and PhD (1995) from Cambridge before joining Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) as a junior lecturer in 1995. He was promoted within QUB to a Readership in 2002 and to a Chair in 2007. He is currently a member of the Centre for Nanostructured Media (CNM), the research cluster within the School of Maths and Physics at QUB focused on nanomaterials and applied solid-state physics. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics (IoP) and a member of the EPSRC peer-review college; he sits on the editorial advisory boards of the IoP’s Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter and of Wiley’s Physica Status Solidi. His primary research interests are in mapping and understanding the manner in which reduced size and increased shape complexity affect the properties of oxide ferroics, with particular interest in ferroelectrics. He has pioneered the investigation of nanoscale single crystals cut from bulk using a Focused Ion Beam Microscope (FIB). In 2012, he received the 'International Award of Ferroelectrics and their Applications' (previously known as the 'Ikeda Award') from the Ferroelectrics Community of Japan dominantly for this FIB work.

• Professor Patrycja Paruch, University of Geneva, Switzerland
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Biography

Patrycja Paruch is an associate professor at DPMC-MaNEP, University of Geneva. She received her BA degree from Harvard University, and her PhD in physics from the University of Geneva, working with Prof. Jean-Marc Triscone, followed by post-doctoral research at Cornell University with the group of Prof. Paul McEwan.  Her group uses a wide range of atomic force microscopy techniques to study (multi)ferroic oxides, focusing in particular on the fundamental static and dynamic behaviour of domain walls, related to the switching, growth and stability of domain structures. She is also interested in the novel functional properties of these ubiquitous, intrinsically nanoscale interfaces and, more broadly, of oxide interfaces in general.  Non-scientifically, she climbs rock and ice, keeps carnivorous plants and herbivorous tortoises, and is somewhat asymptotically working towards a pilot license.

• Dr Manuel Bibes, Unite Mixte de Physique, CNRS, Thales, France
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Biography

Born in Sainte-Foy-la-Grande (Gironde, France) in 1976, Manuel Bibes is a research scientist at the joint CNRS/Thales laboratory in Palaiseau. He received his Ph.D. in 2001 from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the INSA Toulouse after a joint Franco-Spanish thesis on manganite interfaces at the Institut de Ciència de Materials de Barcelona. Following two years of postdoctoral work with A. Fert’s group in Orsay he became a CNRS researcher and joined the Institute of Fundamental Electronics at the University Paris-Sud in 2003. In 2007, he returned to the CNRS/Thales lab to develop research lines on multiferroics, oxide interfaces and ferroic tunnel junctions. He is the coauthor of more than 100 articles in international journals including several reviews, with over 3700 cumulated citations. 

• Professor Beatriz Noheda, University of Groningen, Netherlands
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Biography

Beatriz Noheda is associate professor at the Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials (University of Groningen) Noheda graduated in Physics at the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM), in Spain, where she also obtained her PhD in Physics working on ferroelectric materials. Afterwards she combined a part-time position as assistant lecturer at the UAM with several post-doctoral stays in the group of M. A. Glazer at the Clarendon Laboratory in Oxford (UK) and at Brookhaven National Lab. in New York. There, in 1998, together with Dave Cox and Gen Shirane, she discovered the still now controversial monoclinic phase of piezoelectric PZT and proposed the low crystal symmetry as the origin of the large piezoelectric response in PZT and related materials. In 1999 she became assistant physicist at Brookhaven National Lab and local contact of the powder diffraction line of the NSLS. For personal reasons in 2002 she moved to the Netherlands and, after a short detour working on metal hydrides thin films at the Vrije University of Amsterdam, in 2004 she obtained a Rosalind Franklin Fellowship to initiate her own research line at the University of Groningen. In Groningen she has set a pulsed laser deposition laboratory and other facilities to investigate ultrathin ferroelectric and multiferoic thin films. Highlights of recent research include the growth and control of periodic nanodomains in ferroelastic thin films and the investigation of the distinct properties of domain walls.

• Professor Kathrin Dorr, MLU Halle-Wittenberg, Germany
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Biography

Kathrin Dörr has been born in Halle (Saale), Germany and has graduated in physics from the University of Technology in Dresden, Germany in 1991. She received the PhD degree under the guidance of E. Hegenbarth at the same university in 1996. After holding a Saxonian young researcher´s fellowship for three years, she became head of a group working on ferroic oxide films at the Institute for Metallic Materials at the IFW Dresden. In 2011, Kathrin Dörr joined the Martin Luther University in Halle, Germany as full professor in experimental physics. As a guest scientist she stayed with the groups of J. M. D. Coey at the Trinity College in Dublin (2003) and H. M. Christen at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, TN (2007). Her research includes the epitaxy of complex oxides and relations between the crystallographic structure and electronic properties.

• Professor Cewen Nan, Tsinghua University, China
• Audio recording (mp3)

Biography

Ce-Wen Nan, Professor of Materials Science and Dean of School of Materials Science and Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. Before joining the faculty of Tsinghua University in 1999, he had worked in Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan, China, since 1985. He was elected as a Member of Chinese Academy of Science in 2011. He is the current President of International Ceramics Federation. His recent research focuses on functional materials, including multiferroic magnetoelectric materials, thermoelectric oxides, functional polymer-based composites, and solid state electrolytes. In the field of multiferroic materials, he and his students work on simulation, growth and properties, and applications of the magnetoelectric composites and films. He has published over 400 archival papers based on his research and holds 24 Chinese patents. 

• Professor Dwight Viehland, Virginia Tech, USA
• Audio recording (mp3)

Biography

Dwight Viehland is a professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Virginia Tech. He received his PhD from the Pennsylvania State University. Dwight has worked in the field of magnetoelectric materials and devices for over 10years. He has published over 400 peer-reviewed publications, which have recived over 12,000 citations.

• Professor Nian Sun, Northeastern University, USA
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Biography

Nian Sun is an associate professor at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Northeastern University. He received his Ph.D. degree from Stanford University in 2002. Prior to joining Northeastern University in 2004, he was a scientist at IBM and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies between 2001~2004. Dr. Sun was the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, ONR Young Investigator Award, USAF Summer Faculty Fellowship, the first prize IDEMA Fellowship, and the Søren Buus Outstanding Research Award at Northeastern University. His research interests include novel magnetic, ferroelectric and multiferroic materials, devices and subsystems. He has over 80 journal publications and has >20 patents and patent disclosures. One of his papers published in 2009 was selected as the “ten most outstanding full papers in the past decade (2001~2010) in Advanced Functional Materials”.  

• Professor Ramamoorthy Ramesh, University of California, USA
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Biography

Professor Ramesh graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a PhD in 1987.  He returned to Berkeley in 2004 and is currently the Plato Malozemoff Chair Professor in Materials Science and Physics. Prior to that he was a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland College Park. From 1989-1995, at Bellcore, he initiated research in several key areas of oxide electronics, including ferroelectric nonvolatile memories.  His landmark contributions in ferroelectrics came through the recognition that conducting oxide electrodes are the solution to the problem of polarization fatigue, which for 30 years, remained an enigma and unsolved problem. In 1994, in collaboration with S. Jin (Lucent Technologies), he initiated research into manganite thin films and they coined the term, Colossal Magnetoresistive (CMR) Oxides. At Berkeley, he continues to pursue key scientific and technological problems in complex multifunctional oxide thin films, nanostructures and heterostructures. His group demonstrated the existence of a large ferroelectric polarization in multiferroic BiFeO3 films, in agreement with first principle predictions; they also demonstrated electric field control of antiferromagnetism as well as ferromagnetism, a critical step towards the next generation of storage and spintronics devices that are completely electric field controlled. His current research interests include thermoelectric and photovoltaic energy conversion in complex oxide heterostructures. He has published extensively on the synthesis and materials physics of complex oxide materials.  He received the Humboldt Senior Scientist Prize and Fellowship to the American Physical Society (2001). In 2005, he was elected a Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science as well as the David Adler Lectureship of the American Physical Society. In 2007, he was awarded the Materials Research Society David Turnbull Lectureship Award and in 2009, he was elected Fellow of MRS and is the recipient of the 2010 APS McGroddy New Materials Prize. From December 2010 to August 2012 he served as the Founding Director of the SunShot Initiative at the U.S. Department of Energy, overseeing and coordinate the R&D activities of the Solar Program. In 2011, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.