At 10 a.m. on October 9^th, President Si-chen Lee of NTU presented letter of appointment at the principal's office to Dr. Stuart Parkin who now works at the United States IBM Company. The purpose of this appointment was to recognize Dr Parkin's contribution to spintronics over the past years, and to develop Taiwan's cutting edge technology with a view toward becoming a top notch international technology R&D center within a short time span.

NTU has recently set up an applied physics research institute which will commence recruiting master's level and doctoral students from September 2008. Upon receiving his appointment, Dr. Parkin will chair an ad hoc research seminar at the institute. The Applied Physics Institute was founded under the auspices of Powerchip Semiconductors Company, whose owner provided funding for the Institute to hire three faculty members. setting a prime example of faculty quota donation to universities, Powerchip Semiconductors considers to expand its donation quota pending the future development of the Institute, thereby facilitating NTU's Applied Physics Institute to become an important international R&D unit.

Parkin was originally a UK national. After receiving his doctorate degree from Cambridge University in 190, he went to San Jose, California to do research work for IBM. Over the past twenty years, he has performed outstandingly in many areas of research, and has published over 300 important research papers to date, acquiring 52 patents from the United States government.

The discovery of the GMR(giant magnetoresistance) phenomenon in 1988 led to a new area of research in spintronics, in which Dr. Parkin's contributions have been nothing less than remarkable, as he has conducted many pioneering studies and won many international technological awards, including: the Humboldt Research Award in 2004, the 1999-2000 American Institute of Physics Prize for Industrial Application of Physics, the European Physical Society's Hewlett-Packard Europhysics Prize in 1997, etc. Dr. Parkin had been nominated for the Nobel Prize several times, and he is also serving as the Director of the Center for the Science and Application of Spintronics at Stanford University.

Owing to its high operational speed, high density and non-volatile nature, MRAM (magnetic random access memory) will become the mainstream means of data storage in the future. In the past few years, many research units, including the Physics Department of NTU and research centers of other universities, have invested considerable manpower into fundamental research of MRAM. The Electronics Institute of the Industrial Technology Research Institute and TSMC have also actively involved themselves in MRAM product development in recent years. For the time being, 4M MRAM products have already been developed, and IBM and TDK have jointly announced that in the near future they will launch super high capacity products whose storage exceed 16 gigabites. Such an announcement shocked the technology world, as it may alter the entire ecosystem of information storage, and Dr. Parkin happens to be the leader of this project. During his present visit to NTU, Dr. Parkin will introduce the contents of his research project and the development trend of MRAM to the Applied Physics Institute and other related research personnel, as well as discuss the future details of cooperation in this regard with Nano-technology center of NTU.