SUBJECT:

Director of the Center for Magnetic Recording Research (CMRR)

I am very pleased to announce the appointment of Eric Fullerton as Director of the Center for Magnetic Recording Research, an Organized Research Unit at UCSD, effective July 1, 2011. Eric Fullerton is a professor in the departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and NanoEngineering in the Jacobs School of Engineering. Before joining UCSD in January 2007, Fullerton was a senior manager and research scientist in the Fundamentals of Nano-structured Materials Group at Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, and a past winner of the Exceptional Achievement Award at Argonne National Laboratory, the IBM Outstanding Achievement Award, and the IBM Fourth Plateau Invention Achievement Award. Fullerton earned his Ph.D. at UCSD in 1991.

Dr. Fullerton's expertise is in thin-film magnetic and nano-materials. He is an internationally acclaimed scholar in areas such as thin film and superlattice growth, magnetic recording and nano-technologies, and x-ray and neutron scattering. At IBM/Hitachi, Dr. Fullerton made fundamental advances in the development of high density magnetic recording media based on anti-ferromagnetically coupled ferromagnetic films. Early in his career, he developed a technique for mapping the structure of thin-film multi-layers from x-ray diffraction data that became the standard in the field.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Professor Paul Siegel for his eleven years of service as CMRR's director. During his tenure, the Center has made significant new connections to departments and research beyond magnetic recording.

Please join me in welcoming Professor Fullerton as the next Director of the Center for Magnetic Recording Research.

Sandra A. Brown Vice Chancellor for Research