News Release

Professor Frank Talke Wins Prestigious Humboldt Award

UC San Diego professor Frank Talke is an international authority in tribology and mechanics of magnetic storage systems, ink jet technology, and interferometric instrumentation. (Higher-resolution image)

San Diego, CA, June 27, 2007 -- Frank Talke, professor of mechanical engineering in the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego, has received a 2007 Humboldt Research Award. The prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation is one of the most prestigious scientific honors in Germany, given to eminent foreign scholars in recognition of their lifetime academic achievements.  

Humboldt Research Award winners are invited to carry out research projects with a host university in Germany. Talke, a founding member of the Center for Magnetic Recording Research at UCSD, plans to investigate surface texturing of materials and application of those surfaces in magnetic recording and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) technology.   He will be hosted by professors J. Heinzl and Tim Lűth at the Technische Universität München, Germany.

Talke is an international authority in tribology and mechanics of magnetic storage systems, ink jet technology, and interferometric instrumentation. He is one of the leading experimentalists in the head-disk interface technology of magnetic hard disk drives. He was a pioneer in the application of laser Doppler measurement systems to nanometer-scale dynamics of the read/write slider and disk. During his stay in Germany he will continue the nano-texturing of surfaces to improve the tribological performance of the slider-disk interface at spacings of a few nanometers.

Talke joined UCSD in1986 as a founding member of the Center for Magnetic Recording Research and was the chair of the Applied Mechanics and Engineering Sciences (AMES) Department from 1993 through 1995. He was with the IBM Research and Development Laboratories in San Jose, CA, from 1969 to 1986, where he received three Outstanding Contribution Awards for Technology Research.

Talke holds 11 U.S. patents in magnetic recording and ink jet printing technology. His current research is in the areas of the head/disk and head/tape interface, precision instrumentation, and mechanical design related to magnetic storage devices.  He is the author of more than 260 archived publications and a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Society of Tribologists and Lubrication Engineers (STLE), and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).  He was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1999.

Media Contacts

Rex Graham
Jacobs School of Engineering
858-822-3075
rgraham@soe.ucsd.edu