Stuart Parkin is an IBM Fellow and Manager of the Magnetoelectronics group at the IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, California and a consulting professor in the Department of Applied Physics at Stanford University. He is also director of the IBM–Stanford Spintronic Science and Applications Center, which was formed in 2004. He received his BA and PhD degrees from the University of Cambridge and joined IBM as a postdoctoral fellow in 1982, becoming a permanent member of the staff the following year. In 1999 he was named an IBM Fellow, IBM’s highest technical honor. Parkin’s research interests have included organic superconductors, high-temperature superconductors, and, for almost the past two decades, magnetic thin film structures and spintronic materials and devices for advanced sensor, memory, and logic application. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the American Physical Society, the Institute of Physics (London), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Parkin is the recipient of numerous honors, including a Humboldt Research Award (2004), the 1999-2000 American Institute of Physics Prize for Industrial Applications of Physics, the European Physical Society’s Hewlett- Packard Europhysics Prize (1997), the American Physical Society’s International New Materials Prize (1994), the MRS Outstanding Young Investigator Award (1991) and the Charles Vernon Boys Prize from the Institute of Physics, London (1991). In 2001, he was named R&D Magazine’s first Innovator of the Year and in October 2007 was awarded the Economist Magazine’s “No Boundaries” 2007 Award for Innovation. In 2007 Parkin was named a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the National University of Singapore, a Visiting Chair Professor at the National Taiwan University, and an Honorary Visiting Professor at University College London, The United Kingdom. Parkin has been awarded Honorary Doctorates by the University of Aachen, Germany and the Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. Parkin has authored ~350 papers and has ~63 issued patents.