Albert Fert
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Professor Albert Fert is a French physicist, and one of the discoverers of the Giant magnetoresistive effect which brought about a breakthrough in gigabyte hard disks.
Fert is a professor and a scientific director of the Unité mixte de physique CNRS/Thales, which is associated with the Université Paris-Sud.
In 1988 he discovered the Giant magnetoresistive effect (GMR) in multilayers of iron and chromium. (GMR was simultaneously and independently discovered by Peter Grünberg from the Jülich Research Centre)
Fert's work has been recognised with shared prizes in the APS International Prize for New Materials (1994), the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics Magnetism Award(1994)and the Hewlett-Packard Europhysics Prize (1997). At a national level, he received the Grand prix de physique Jean Ricard of the French Physical Society, the 2003 CNRS Gold Medal, and was elected at the French Academy of Sciences in 2004.
