Discovery Park Distinguished Lecture Series to welcome Hideo Ohno

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Professor Hideo Ohno, president of Tohoku University and world-renowned expert in the field of spintronics, will present a Discovery Park Distinguished Lecture on Sept. 11 titled “Why We Need Spintronics in the Era of IoT and AI.” This lecture is presented by Discovery Park and the Purdue Quantum Science and Engineering Institute (PQSEI) as part of the Discovery Park Distinguished Lecture Series and is an event in Purdue's sesquicentennial celebration, 150 Years of Giant Leaps.

Ohno’s lecture will begin at 9:30 a.m. in the Burton D. Morgan Center for Entrepreneurship, Room 121. His talk is in conjunction with the Purdue University/Tohoku University joint Spintronics Workshop II, held from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. This lecture will also be livestreamed; click here to access the stream. His presentation will review the development of magnetic tunnel junction devices as well as three-terminal spintronics devices that can also open routes toward neuromorphic applications.

The visit will coincide with a new agreement for a partnership between Purdue and Tohoku University. The agreement facilitates joint research and education programs leading to the development of next-generation quantum and spintronic materials and devices, as well as the exchange of researchers and students in these areas.

“President Ohno is a pioneer of spintronics and we are honored to have him visit,” says Tomás Díaz de la Rubia, Purdue chief scientific officer and senior vice president for strategic initiatives. “We are equally excited about the new collaborative efforts between our two universities and its potential for fostering advances in areas of quantum science and engineering, spintronics, and materials science.”

Although this specific collaborative agreement is new, it stems from a joint Tohoku-Purdue workshop on spintronics held at Tohoku in 2018 and builds upon a longstanding relationship between Purdue and Tohoku. For example, Purdue professor Ei-ichi Negishi, 2010 winner of the Nobel Prize in chemistry and the Herbert C. Brown Distinguished Professor, was a founding international advisory board member of the World Premier International Research Center Initiative’s (WPI) Advanced Institute for Materials Research (AIMR) located at Tohoku, and he served on the board from 2007 to 2017.

Ohno received his PhD from the University of Tokyo in 1982. He was appointed professor at Tohoku University in 1994 and has been president of the university since 2018. His research interests include spintronics and semiconductor science and technology. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, Ohno has been an honorary professor of the Institute of Semiconductors, Chinese Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the Institute of Physics, the Japan Society of Applied Physics, the American Physical Society, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

“We are very excited to host President Ohno during our spintronics workshop,” says Yong Chen, the Karl Lark-Horovitz Professor of Physics and Astronomy and professor of electrical and computer engineering and inaugural director of PQSEI, who is also a foreign principal investigator for the WPI-AIMR Center. “His innovative research in spintronics and semiconductor science and technology are extraordinary.”

The Discovery Park Distinguished Lecture Series is made possible by the Lilly Endowment as a mechanism for Purdue University and Discovery Park to bring to campus the latest thinking about science and technology and other broad areas of public interest.

About Discovery Park
Discovery Park is a place where Purdue researchers move beyond traditional boundaries, collaborating across disciplines and with policymakers and business leaders to create solutions for a better world. Grand challenges of global health, global conflict and security, and those that lie at the nexus of sustainable energy, world food supply, water and the environment are the focus of researchers in Discovery Park. The translation of discovery to impact is integrated into the fabric of Discovery Park through entrepreneurship programs and partnerships.

About Purdue Quantum Science and Engineering Institute

Located in Discovery Park, PQSEI fosters the development of practical and impactful aspects of quantum science, and focuses on discovering and studying new materials, devices and basic physical quantum systems that will be suited for integration into tomorrow’s technology. It encourages interdisciplinary collaboration leading to the design and realization of quantum devices with enhanced functionality and performance close to the fundamental limit, aiming to ultimately bring them to a vast community of users.  PQSEI faculty work on a broad range of topics in quantum science and technologies including quantum materials and devices, quantum photonics, atomic molecular and optical physics, quantum chemistry, quantum measurement and control, quantum simulation, and quantum information and computing.