Recently, I have made Spintec my new home. Or workplace. It’s hard to differentiate sometimes due to the kind and helpful colleagues who are always ready to discuss life over a cup of coffee. Spintec is an interesting place since it brings together researchers from different fields of magnetism and spintronics community at different stages of their career. So, it doesn’t come as a surprise to me that Spintec hosted the kick-off for the huge PEPR SPIN project this January. Funded by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR), PEPR SPIN (Link to their website) aims to support research and innovation in the field of spintronics to achieve energy efficient, fast, and sustainable technology.
Many prominent researchers from all around France gathered in one place to celebrate the launch but also to share ideas and foster collaboration. The highlight of the day were two very interesting talks. The first one from the 2007 Nobel Laureate for the discovery of the giant magnetoresistance (GMR), Albert Fert about how the field of spintronics has developed over the years and the intriguing future potentials of upcoming phenomena and technologies. The second talk was from the co-founder of Spintec and a well-known name in the world of spintronics especially magnetic random-access memories (MRAMs), Bernard Dieny. He talked about the plethora of applications where magnetism and spintronics could be applied ranging from microelectronics to healthcare. If you are interested in how memory works in a computer and how does spintronics fit into memory technology, check out this post (Link to post).
The talks helped put my own research in perspective to the broader picture. As a student, the next most important thing for me was the food. It helped recover the calories that I spent understanding the talks given in French.
In the evening, we were welcomed at the Musée de Grenoble for the gala evening. I got the opportunity to interact with colleagues from different research centers in Grenoble and from different cities of France. I like these events since they allow us to discuss and get acquainted with each other in an informal setting. Sharing their love for science, food and art, hundreds of researchers enjoyed an evening away from experiments, data, and research papers. Although I am sure, there were a lot of scientific discussions that were casually brought in.
