Student Awards

IEEE Neil Smith Award for Contributions to the Understanding of Magnetic Phenomena in Materials and Devices

The inaugural IEEE Neil Smith Award will be presented at TMRC this year for the best contributed student posters. The IEEE award is in memory of Neil Smith, whose productive industrial research career was underpinned by a mastery of experimental measurement techniques and theoretical analysis. An award committee will select a separate winner from each of the two poster sessions. The two winners will each receive a $1,000 cash prize. The winning posters need to be original contributions that contain an advance in the understanding of a technologically relevant physical system or phenomena. The selection criteria will be based on originality and impact of the material, as well as quality of the poster presentation.

Candidate Eligibility Criteria

·         Undergraduate or Graduate Student.

·         Lead contributor and presenter of primarily their own work on a contributed poster.

Required Submission Materials

·         A brief justification on why the work should be considered for the award (less than 300 words).

·        Letter of support for the student from a research advisor, who must be a member of the IEEE Magnetics Society.

Please indicate desire to be considered for the award when submitting the poster. Please send the award justification and letter of support to the IEEE Neil Smith Award chair (Michael Grobis, mkgrobis@ieee.org) before the poster submission deadline. 

Winners for 2023:

HDD magnetic storage: Yijia Liu, University of Minnesota

Solid-state storage: Cheng-Hsiang (Jason) Hsu, UC Berkeley