Carleton welcomed back Nobel Prize laureate in physics Peter Grünberg to its campus Sept. 4, where he was awarded an honorary doctorate and gave a lecture on the various findings over his career.
“We offer honorary degrees usually at graduation but this year we’re doing something very special by starting our academic year with an honorary degree,” Carleton president Roseann Runte said.
“It is a very special honorary degree because around 40 years ago, Dr. Grünberg started his academic career as a postdoc here at Carleton University – that academic career that he began here was noted with a Nobel Prize,” Runte said.
Grünberg came to Ottawa in 1969 as a postdoctoral fellow of the National Research Council of Canada at Carleton in the chemistry department, according to a Carleton press release.
Along with his partner Albert Fert, Grünberg received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2007 for his and Fert’s work in developing the technology needed to create what we know today to be gigabyte capacity hard drives, according to the Nobel laureate website.
In his talk titled ‘From spinwaves to antiferromagnetism coupling and GMR,’ he credited his research at Carleton as the building blocks for a discovery that what would, in a few years from then, earn him and his partner the most recognized award in science.
Acknowledging the work of Damon Eshbach and Dr. Arnold Koningstein, Grünberg said they were the “the giants whose shoulders I stood on so I could see further.”
In 1969 it was Koningstein who hired Grünberg to work in his lab at the chemistry department at Carleton to kick-start his research.
“Sometimes it is necessary to change the research topic, but it is good not to change everything at the same time,” Grünberg said.
Despite his presentation being technical in nature, Grünberg, who is 73 and suffers from Parkinson’s disease, kept his audience entertained throughout with his witty sense of humor, occasionally poking fun at faculty.
Grünberg said it felt great to be back in Canada’s capital after his travels to the United States would often take him over Ottawa and its parliamentary buildings.
“Sometimes I would see the Parliament buildings from the air and I thought to myself, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to be there again?’” Grünberg said.
For Carleton engineering alumus Jean-Luc Cooke, listening to a Nobel Prize winner explain his career path was a lesson worth taking home.
“He explained to future researchers how the path to great discoveries are not always linear and not always obvious,” Cooke said.
“Showing how in his major milestones an experimental error was explored and an assembly mistake led to his discovery of being able to control certain aspects of his experiments and later on he made a further discovery of how to amplify it and how to make use of that – I think that’s a very useful lesson for us.”
