Albert Fert was born on March 7, 1938 in France. He holds degrees from the École Normale Supérieure and the University of Paris. He is an emeritus professor at Université Paris-Sud and scientific director of a joint laboratory between the Centre national de la recherché scientiifique and Thales Group. Fert is also an adjunct professor of physics at Michigan State University. In 2007, together with Peter Grünberg, he won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work with technology used to read information from computer hard drives. Fert’s discoveries led to sensitive tools for reading the information stored on hard disks and recently made it possible to miniaturize hard drives. They have also led to the development of the new type of electronics called spintronics. His work has strong roots at Michigan State where Fert regularly collaborates with Jack Bass, Bill Pratt, and Peter Schroeder on giant magnetoresistance.
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