INSIC’s twelfth annual Leadership Achievement and Technical Achievement Awards will be presented at the 2007 INSIC Annual Meeting in Monterey, CA, on July 16^th.  Nominations may be submitted by anyone affiliated with an INSIC member organization.  Nominations for both awards are now being sought from the INSIC community.

The Leadership Achievement Award recognizes an individual who has played a key leadership role in an INSIC Research Program or in some other aspect of INSIC’s activities.  To qualify for the award, the leadership contribution must be judged to have been of significance in helping INSIC toward achieving its goals as a consortium.  The 2006 Leadership Achievement Award winner was Ed Gage of Seagate Technology, who received the award for his exceptional leadership in guiding the INSIC HAMR Research Program in heat-assisted magnetic recording.  Other distinguished past winners of the Leadership Award include Bob Raymond (Sun Microsystems), Terry McDaniel (Seagate Technology), C. Singh Bhatia (Hitachi GST), Alexei Sacks (Seagate Technology), Mary (Doerner) Minardi (Hitachi GST), Mike O’Neill (Calimetrics), Glenn Sincerbox (University of Arizona), Hans Coufal (IBM), Lambertus Hesselink (Stanford University), Jim Brug (Hewlett-Packard) and Dennis Howe (University of Arizona).

The Technical Achievement Award recognizes the contributor(s) of a specific technical achievement in an INSIC Research Program, for a contribution judged to provide a significant advancement toward the Program’s stated goals.  In 2006, the Technical Achievement Award went jointly to Randy Victora, Jianping Wang, Xiao Shen & Weikang Shen of the University of Minnesota, for their pioneering work on Exchange-Coupled Composite (ECC) recording media for the INSIC EHDR Research Program for advanced hard disk storage technology.  Previous winners of the Technical Achievement Award include Bo Liu, Leonard Gonzaga & Mingsheng Zhang (Data Storage Institute, Singapore), Neal Bertram (University of California San Diego), Kai-Zhong Gao (Seagate Technology), Jonathan Wickert (Carnegie Mellon University), Dave Warland (Calimetrics), Steve McLaughlin (Georgia Tech), Jack Judy (University of Minnesota), Randy Victora (University of Minnesota), Wenbin Peng (University of Minnesota), Sergei Orlov (Stanford University), Roy Gustafson (Seagate Technology), Yip-Wah Chung (Northwestern University), and Jae Moon (University of Minnesota).

Each of these prestigious awards consists of a cash prize and an attractive commemorative plaque.  Review of all nominations and selection of the award winners will be made by a subcommittee of the INSIC Board of Directors.

Nominations for the 2007 INSIC Achievement Awards are now being solicited.  Written nominations can be sent via e-mail to insic@insic.org, and must reach INSIC by June 15, 2007.

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