Pioneers in materials research

Francesca Santoro: building blocks for the human body 

Francesca Santoro discovered a fascinating topic at an early stage in her scientific career: she works on bioelectronic materials and studies how they interact with the human body. In Italy, her home country, Santoro developed microplasters that electrically stimulate injured skin cells to improve the healing of damaged tissue.  

Santoro continued to work on this innovation after moving to Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany. There, a team she led succeeded in developing a new microchip. It is based on conductive polymers and light-sensitive molecules that imitate the retina and its visual pathways. “The beauty of microchips is that they have what are called deep neural networks, which are capable of learning: initially we still have to tell them what to do, but the longer they ‘cooperate’ with human neurons, the better they fit in,” Santoro explains. She says this gives her reason to hope that retinal implants could in future be better fused with the human body for the benefit of the patient. 

Stuart Parkin: magnets for digital data transfer 

When he was still working in industry, Stuart Parkin from the UK laid the foundation for a revolutionary breakthrough. “When I first suggested it, I was told it was impossible,” recalls Parkin. And yet his research into thin magnetic layers made it possible for data to be reliably read even from very densely packed storage materials. This allowed the data density on hard discs to be increased by a factor of 1,000 - a key prerequisite for big data applications. Thanks in part to Parkin’s work, films and images can easily be shared on social media or via computer clouds nowadays.  

Parkin is continuing to advance materials research for next-generation data processing at the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics in the eastern German city of Halle, where he has been the director since 2014. His “racetrack concept” could allow data to be read from hard drives not only in huge quantities but also considerably faster than is currently the case. Once again, Parkin is taking advantage of the special properties of magnets, using them as storage units that race through a nanowire at speeds of several kilometres per second.