Lecturers

Prof. Atsufumi Hirohata is affiliated with the Center for Science and Innovation in Spintronics since October 2023. He has over 25 years of experience in spintronics, ranging from magnetic-domain imaging to spin-current interference. Before joining Tohuku University, he has been a professor at York University for 16 years.

He received his Ph.D. in Physics at the University of Cambridge in 2001 and then served as a research associate at the Cavendish Laboratory to complete his study on spin detection of optically pumped spin-polarised electrons in a semiconductor with using a ferromagnetic overlayers, which attracted great interests, resulting a few invited talks and papers. He was originally graduated from Keio University for his BSc and MSc studies in Physics.

Dr. Alina M. Deac obtained her degree in Physics from the Babes-Bolyai University (Cluj-Napoca, Romania) in 2000, and her Master and PhD from the Joseph Fourier University (Grenoble, France) in 2001 and 2005, respectively. The focus of her PhD work was spin-momentum transfer-induced phenomena, which she carried out at SPINTEC. She continued her research in the same field as a JSPS Fellow at AIST, Tsukuba (Japan), a Marie Curie Fellow at NIST, Boulder (USA) and Forschungszentrum Jülich (Germany), and finally as an Ambizione Fellow at EPFL (Switzerland). Since October 2011, she is leader of the Spintronics group at Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR). 

Kyung-Jin Lee is a professor at Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Korea University. He received his BA, MS, and PhD degrees from KAIST, and joined Korea University in 2005 after working at Samsung Advance Institute of Technology for 5 years. He was a postdoctoral from 2003 to 2005 at SPINTEC, France. His research area includes modeling study on spin dynamics, spin transport, and spin transfer torque. His research focuses on improved understanding of current-induced magnetization dynamics and development of a new class of spintronic devices based on spin transfer torques. His current research interest is spin-orbit coupling effects on spin torque and magnetization dynamics.

Dr. Randy Dumas is a Applications Scientist at Quantum Design (QD). His interests primarily lie in the fabrication and experimental characterization of the structural, magnetic, and transport properties of a variety of nano-scale magnetic materials. More specifically, magnetization reversal and hysteresis, magnetoresistance, interlayer coupling, exchange bias, and spin-transfer torque. Expertise in sputter deposition, e-beam evaporation, electrodeposition, photo- and e-beam lithography, x-ray reflectivity and diffraction, SQUID, alternating gradient and vibrating sample magnetometry, magneto-optical Kerr effect, magnetic force microscopy, and high frequency transport measurements. He received his B.S. degree in Physics from UCSD (2003) and his Ph.D. degree in Physics from UC Davis (2009).

Prof. S.N. Piramanayagam has an experience of 30 years in the field of magnetism with research topics ranging from amorphous magnetic alloy, permanent magnetic materials to thin films and nanostructures for recording and spintronics applications. His current interest lies in the inter-dsciplinary areas of magnetism, electronics and nanotechnology. His research aims to gain understanding and solve issues related to areas such as Spintronics, Magnetic Recording and neuromorphic computing. He has recently secured a multi-million dollar grant for research on Spin-based Neuromorphic Computing. 

S.N. Piramanayagam obtained his Bachelor's degree from Madurai Kamaraj University, India in 1985, Masters degree in Physics from University of Kerala, Trivandrum, India and PhD from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India (1994). After his PhD, he carried out further research at Shinshu University, Japan (from 1995-1999).

Dr. Cindi Dennis received her D.Phil. in Condensed Matter Physics from University of Oxford (UK) and B.S. in Physics and in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University (USA). Her research interests at NIST are in the characterization of magnetic materials, from 0D to 3D, including the development of quantitative measurement methods and SI-traceability through Standard Reference Materials.  Materials range from metallo-organic frameworks, nano-objects, including nanoparticles and nanowires and polymer-magnetic nanoparticle nanocomposites for biomedical applications and thermometry, thin films for spintronics applications and nanomagnetic logic, and bulk materials for the magneto-caloric effect, as permanent magnets, as ultra-soft magnets, as spin glasses, and as superconductors.

Kerem received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University in 2015, where he continued as a post-doctoral researcher between 2015 and 2020 before joining the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2020. 

His Ph.D. work established a modular approach to connect a growing set of emerging materials and phenomena to circuits and systems, a framework that has also been adopted by others. In his later work, he used this approach to establish the concept of p-bits and p-circuits as a bridge between classical and quantum circuits to design efficient, domain-specific hardware accelerators for the beyond-More era of electronics.

He is a founding member of the Technical Committee on Quantum, Neuromorphic, and Unconventional Computing within the IEEE Nanotechnology Council where he leads the unconventional computing section. He has received the IEEE Magnetics Society Early Career Award, a Bell Labs Prize, the ONR Young Investigator Award, and the NSF CAREER award for his work on probabilistic computing. He is a senior member of the IEEE.