Faculty Profiles

Dr. Fullerton's expertise is in thin-film magnetic and nano-materials. He is an internationally acclaimed scholar in areas such as thin film and superlattice growth, magnetic recording and nano-technologies, and x-ray and neutron scattering. At IBM/Hitachi, Dr. Fullerton made fundamental advances in the development of high density magnetic recording media based on anti-ferromagnetically coupled ferromagnetic films. Early in his career, he developed a technique for mapping the structure of thin-film multi-layers from x-ray diffraction data that became the standard in the field.

Capsule Bio:

Eric Fullerton is the Endowed Chair Professor at UC San Diego's Center for Magnetic Recording Research (CMRR) and a professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering at UC San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2018 “for invention and development of multilayer, high-density magnetic recording media.” Before joining UC San Diego in January 2007, Fullerton was a senior manager and research scientist in the Fundamentals of Nano-structured Materials Group at Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (formerly IBM Almaden Research Center). He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, and a past winner of the Exceptional Achievement Award at Argonne National Laboratory, the IBM Outstanding Achievement Award, and the IBM Fourth Plateau Invention Achievement Award. Fullerton earned his Ph.D. at UC San Diego in 1991.