Michael Coey was born in Belfast in 1945. He studied physics at Cambridge, and then taught English and physics at the Sainik School, Balachadi (Gujarat). There he read Allan Morrish’s Physical Principles of Magnetism from cover to cover (while recovering from jaundice) before moving to Canada in 1968 to join Morrish’s group at the University of Manitoba for a PhD on Mõssbauer spectroscopy of iron oxides. He has worked on magnetism ever since – a life of paid play. After graduating in 1971, he joined Benoy Chakraverty’s group at the CNRS in Grenoble as a postdoc with a letter of appointment signed by Louis Néel. Entering the CNRS the following year, he worked on the metalinsulator as well as the magnetism of amorphous solids and natural minerals. In France, he built the network of collaborators which sustained much of his career. On a sabbatical with Stefan von Molnar at the IBM Research Center at Yorktown Heights, he learned about magneto-transport and the crystal field. Then, in 1979, he moved to Ireland as a lecturer at Trinity College Dublin and set about establishing a magnetism research group in a venerable but woefully underfunded Physics Department. Luckily, support from the EU substitution programme enabled him to begin research on melt-spun magnetic glasses. Following the discovery of Nd2Fe14B permanent magnets in 1984, he and colleagues from Grenoble, Birmingham and Berlin launched the Concerted European Action on Magnets. xi xii About the Editors CEAM blossomed into an informal association of 90 academic and industrial research institutes interested in every aspect of the properties, processing and applications of rare-earth iron permanent magnets. He and his student Sun Hong discovered the interstitial nitride magnet Sm2Fe17N3 in 1990. The group investigated other rare-earth intermetallic compounds, as well as magnetic oxide films produced by pulsed-laser deposition. During this period, he and David Hurley started up Magnetic Solutions to develop innovative applications of permanent magnets. The scientific landscape in Ireland was transformed by the establishment of Science Foundation Ireland in 2000, given the mission of developing competitive scientific research in Ireland with a budget to match. His group were able to develop a programme in thin film magnetism and spin electronics, producing Europe’s first magnetic tunnel junctions to exhibit 200 % tunnel magnetoresistance. Later they discovered the first zero-moment ferrimagnetic half-metal and explored the garden of magneto-electrochemistry. Michael coey was a promotor of CRANN, Ireland’s nanoscience research centre, and the Science Gallery, now an international franchise, was his brainchild. Together with Dominique Givord, he launched the Joint European Magnetic Symposia (JEMS) and, while chair of C9, the IUPAP Magnetism Committee, inaugurated the Néel medal that is awarded triennially at the International Conference on Magnetism. The 2015 JEMS meeting in Dublin saw areunion of many of his 60 PhD students, from all over the world. Together they have published many papers. Books include Magnetic Glasses, 1984 (with Kishin Moorjani): Permanent Magnetism, 1999 (with Ralph Skomski): and Magnetism and Magnetic Materials, 2010. Honours include Fellowship of the Royal Society, International membership of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fulbright fellowship, a Humboldt Prize, the Gold Medal of the Royal Irish Academy and the 2019 Born Medal. He has enjoyed visiting professorships at the University of Strasbourg, the National University of Singapore and Beihang University in Beijing. Michael Coey married Wong May, a writer, in 1973; they have two sons and a grand-daughter..Stuart S. P. Parkin is a director of the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics, Halle, Germany, and an Alexander von Humboldt Professor, Martin Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg. His research interests include spintronic materials and devices for advanced sensor, memory and logic applications, oxide thin-film heterostructures, topological metals, exotic superconductors, and cognitive devices. Stuart’s discoveries in spintronics enabled a more than 10,000- fold increase in the storage capacity of magnetic disk drives. For his work that, thereby, enabled the ‘big data’ world of today. In 2014, he was awarded the Millennium Technology Award from the Technology Academy Finland and, most recently, the King Faisal Prize for Science 2021 for his research into three distinct classes of spintronic memories. Stuart is a fellow or member of: The Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the German National Academy of Science – Leopoldina, The Royal Society of Edinburgh, The Indian Academy of Sciences, and TWAS – The academy of sciences for the developing world. Stuart is also a fellow of the American Physical Society: the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) the Institute of Physics, London: the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS); and the Materials Research Society. Stuart has published more than 600 papers and has more than 121 issued patents. His h factor is 120. Clarivate Analytics named him a Highly Cited Researcher in 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021. Stuart’s numerous awards include the American Physical Society International Prize for New Materials (1994); the Europhysics Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Solid State Physics (1997); the 2009 IUPAP Magnetism Prize and Néel Medal; the 2012 von Hippel Award – Materials Research Society; the 2013 Swan Medal – Institute of Physics; an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship – International Award for Research (2014); and ERC Advanced Grant – SORBET (2015). Stuart has been a distinguished visiting professor at several universities worldwide including: National University of Singapore; National Taiwan University; National Yunlin University of Science and Technology, Taiwan; Eindhoven University of Tech- xiv About the Editors nology, The Netherlands; KAIST, Korea; and University College London. Stuart has been awarded four honorary doctorates by: RWTH Aachen University (2007), Eindhoven University of Technology (2008), The University of Regensburg (2011), and Technische Universität Kaiserslautern, Germany (2013). Prior to being appointed to the Max Planck Society, Stuart had spent a large part of his career with IBM Research at the San Jose Research Laboratory, which became the Almaden Research Center when it moved to a new campus. Stuart was appointed an IBM Fellow, IBM’s highest technical honour, by IBM’s chairman, Louis Gerstner in 1999. He received his BA physics and theoretical physics (1977), an MA, and his PhD (1980) from the University of Cambridge. He was a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he received an entrance scholarship (1974), a senior scholarship (1975), a research scholarship (1977) and was elected a research fellow (1979). In 2014, he became an honorary fellow. Stuart received a Royal Society European Exchange Fellowship to carry out postdoctoral research at the Laboratoire de Physique des Solides, Université Paris-Sud, France, in 1980–1981 and an IBM World Trade Fellowship to carry out research at IBM in San Jose.
