Johan Åkerman

Biography

My research career started out as a Masters student at EPFL in Switzerland where I worked on high-temperature superconductivity (HTS). My graduate studies at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm Sweden mainly dealt with vortex dynamics in HTS films. After defending my PhD in 1998 I then accepted a postdoc position at UC San Diego in the US. After 2.5 years I switched from Academia to industry and joined Motorola in Phoenix Arizona to develop Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory (MRAM). After 4 years in MRAM R&D I applied for, and received, a larger Swedish research grant to return to Academia to do more fundamental spintronic research. I have built up Sweden’s strongest research group on Applied Spintronics and currently focus on Spin Torque Oscillators. I have published close to 100 papers, which are cited about a 1000 times, and I have given some 20-30 invited talks at international conferences and workshops.