About the Author:

Michael Coey was born in Belfast in 1945. He studied physics at Cambridge, and then taught English and Physics at the Sainik School, Balachadi (Gujarat) where he read Allan Morrish's Physical Principles of Magnetism from cover to cover (while suffering from jaundice) before moving to Canada in 1968 to join Morrish's group at the University of Manitoba for a PhD on Mossbauer spectroscopy of iron oxides. He has worked on magnetism ever since -- a life of paid play. On graduating in 1971, he took up a post-doc with Benoy Chakraverty's group at the CNRS in Grenoble with a letter of appointment signed by Louis Néel. There, he was appointed attaché and then chargé de recherche, studying the metal-insulator as well as the magnetism of amorphous solids and natural minerals. In France, he built a network of collaborators which sustained much of his career. A first sabbatical was with Stefan von Molnar at the IBM Thomas J Watson Research Center at Yorktown Heights where he learned about magneto-transport and specific heat and the crystal field. Then in 1979, he left France for Ireland taking a position of lecturer at Trinity College Dublin and set about establishing a magnetism research group in a venerable but woefully underfunded Physics Department. Luckily, he secured support from the EU substitution program and began work on melt-spun metallic glasses. After the discovery of Nd₂Fe₁₄B permanent magnets in 1982, together with colleagues from Grenoble, Birmingham and Berlin they launched the Concerted European Action on Magnets, which blossomed into an informal association of 90 academic and industrial research institutes interested in all aspects of the properties, processing and applications of rare-earth iron permanent magnets. Together with Sun Hong, he discovered the interstitial nitride magnet Sm₂Fe₁₇N₃ in 1993, and his group investigated rare-earth intermetallic compounds, as well as magnetic oxide films produced by pulsed-laser deposition. During this period, he started up Magnetic Solutions with David Hurley in 1996 to develop innovative applications of permanent magnets. Then in 2000, the scientific landscape in Ireland was transformed by the creation of Science Foundation Ireland, with the ambition to develop scientific research and a budget to match. His group were able to develop a competitive research program in thin film magnetism and spin electronics. They produced Europe's first magnetic tunnel junctions to exhibit 200 % tunnel magnetoresistance, and later discovered the first zero-moment ferrimagnetic half-metal. He also developed an interest in magnetoelectrochemistry. He was a promotor of CRANN, Ireland's nanoscience research centre, and the Science Gallery, now an international franchise, was his brainchild. Together with Dominique Givord, he started the Joint European Magnetic Symposia (JEMS), and when chair of C9, the IUPAP Magnetism Commission, he inaugurated the Néel medal that is awarded at the triennial International Conference on Magnetism. The 2015 JEMS meeting in Dublin saw a reunion of many of his 60 PhD students, from all over the world. Together they have published many papers, and he has written several books, including Magnetic Glasses 1984 (with Kishin Moorjani), Permanent Magnetism 1999 (with Ralph Skomski) and Magnetism and Magnetic Materials 2010. Honours include Fellowship of the Royal Society, International membership of the US National Academy of Sciences, a Fulbright fellowship, a Humboldt Prize, the Gold Medal of the Royal Irish Academy and the 2019 Born Medal. Visiting professorships included the University of Strasbourg, the National University of Singapore and Beihang University in Beijing. Michael Coey married Wong May, a poet, in 1973; they have two sons.

Stuart Parkin is the Managing Director of the Max Planck Institute for Microstructure Physics, Halle, Germany, and an Alexander von Humboldt Professor, Martin Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg. His research interests include spintronic materials and devices for advanced sensor, memory, and logic applications, oxide thin-film heterostructures, topological metals, exotic superconductors, and cognitive devices. Parkin's discoveries in spintronics enabled a more than 10000-fold increase in the storage capacity of magnetic disk drives. For his work that thereby enabled the "big data" world of today, Parkin was awarded the Millennium Technology Award from the Technology Academy Finland in 2014 (worth 1,000,000 Euro). Parkin is a Fellow/ Member of: Royal Society (London), Royal Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, German National Academy of Science - Leopoldina, Royal Society of Edinburgh, Indian Academy of Sciences, and TWAS - academy of sciences for the developing world and has received numerous awards from around the world.