Jagadeesh Subbaiah Moodera is an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 physicist

Physics

Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...

 of India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

n origin and is senior research scientist at MIT's Francis Bitter

Francis Bitter

Francis Bitter was an American physicist.Bitter invented the Bitter plate used in resistive magnets . He is the one who thought of using dust to visualize a magnetic field...

 Magnet Laboratory. In 1994 he led an MIT research team in the discovery of a practical way to implement room temperature magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) using a magnetic stack based on CoFe–Al2O3–Co, demonstrating a tunnel magnetoresistance

Tunnel magnetoresistance

The Tunnel magnetoresistance is a magnetoresistive effect that occurs in magnetic tunnel junctions . This is a component consisting of two ferromagnets separated by a thin insulator. If the insulating layer is thin enough , electrons can tunnel from one ferromagnet into the other...

 ratio (TMR) of 11.8%.

Low temperature magnetoresistive tunneling had been discovered by Michel Julliere in 1975 but it would be more than a decade before a room temp system was found. In 1991, Terunobu Miyazaki and others at Tohoku University

Tohoku University

, abbreviated to , located in the city of Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture in the Tōhoku Region, Japan, is a Japanese national university. It is the third oldest Imperial University in Japan and is a member of the National Seven Universities...

 had demonstrated a MTJ with room temp TMR of 2.7% but this effect was too small to be of use in practical devices. In 1994, Miyazaki's team, working independently of Moodera's, also developed a room temperature MTJ with high TMR (18.0%) based on an Fe–Al2O3–Fe stack, thus garnering recognition as co-developer of room temp magnetoresistive tunnelling along with Moodera.http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/501/gallagher.html

Besides its great fundamental interest, room temperature magnetoresistive tunnelling is the basis for practical devices including MRAM

MRAM

Magnetoresistive Random-Access Memory is a non-volatile computer memory technology that has been under development since the 1990s. Continued increases in density of existing memory technologies – notably flash RAM and DRAM – kept it in a niche role in the market, but its proponents...

 and read heads used in hard disk

Hard disk

A hard disk drive is a non-volatile, random access digital magnetic data storage device. It features rotating rigid platters on a motor-driven spindle within a protective enclosure. Data is magnetically read from and written to the platter by read/write heads that float on a film of air above the...

s. Moodera was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society

American Physical Society

The American Physical Society is the world's second largest organization of physicists, behind the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft. The Society publishes more than a dozen scientific journals, including the world renowned Physical Review and Physical Review Letters, and organizes more than 20...

 in 2000 "for pioneering and sustained contributions to the understanding of spin

Spin (physics)

In quantum mechanics and particle physics, spin is a fundamental characteristic property of elementary particles, composite particles , and atomic nuclei.It is worth noting that the intrinsic property of subatomic particles called spin and discussed in this article, is related in some small ways,...

-polarized transport in solids." Before investigating ferromagnetic tunneling, Moodera worked for many years on spin-polarized tunneling in superconductor junctions along with Bob Meservey and Paul Tedrow. Moodera, Meservey, Tedrow and Miyazaki shared the 2009 Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize

Buckley Prize

The Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize is an annual award given by the American Physical Society "to recognize and encourage outstanding theoretical or experimental contributions to condensed matter physics." It was endowed by AT&T Bell Laboratories as a means of recognizing outstanding...

 "for pioneering work in the field of spin-dependent tunneling and for the application of these phenomena to the field of magnetoelectronics."http://www.aps.org/programs/honors/prizes/prizerecipient.cfm?name=Jagadeesh%20Moodera&year=2009

Born in Bangalore

Bangalore

Bengaluru , formerly called Bengaluru is the capital of the Indian state of Karnataka. Bangalore is nicknamed the Garden City and was once called a pensioner's paradise. Located on the Deccan Plateau in the south-eastern part of Karnataka, Bangalore is India's third most populous city and...

, India, Moodera attended Mysore University (B.S. and M.S.) and the Indian Institute of Technology (Ph.D.). He was briefly at West Virginia University

West Virginia University

West Virginia University is a public research university in Morgantown, West Virginia, USA. Other campuses include: West Virginia University at Parkersburg in Parkersburg; West Virginia University Institute of Technology in Montgomery; Potomac State College of West Virginia University in Keyser;...

 before joining the Francis Bitter Magnet Laboratory staff at MIT in 1981.