IEEE distinguished lecturers: Yoichiro Tanaka

Yoichiro Tanaka is a professor in the Research Institute of Electrical Communication (RIEC) at Tohoku University. He received the bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Communications Engineering and the Ph.D. degree in Electronic Engineering from Tohoku University, where he did his thesis research on perpendicular magnetic recording physics and storage system integrations. He has worked in Toshiba’s storage device business and in academia for over 30 years. He is devoted to the proof and development of PMR and helped realize the world’s first PMR hard disk drive in 2005. His career includes the development of a giant magnetoresistive head, perpendicular granular thin film media, and, recently, new computational storage systems with integrated big-data analytics capability. He won Nikkei BP Technology Awards (1997, 2006), the Japan Magnetics Society Achievement Award (2006), and the Okochi Memorial Prize (2007). He is a senior member of the IEEE and a member of the Magnetics Society Administrative Committee for a three -year term, 2022-2024. He is a fellow of the Magnetics Society of Japan (MSJ). He is currently serving as Secretary General for the International Magnetics Conference (Intermag 2023, Sendai).