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Inaugural Taft fellowship awarded

12 October 2005

Dr Xiaodong Wu, a research fellow in the Department of Materials Engineering, has been named the inaugural recipient of the university's Taft Fellowship.

From left: Dr Xiaodong Wu, Dr Kiyonori Suzuki, Professor Richard Larkins and Emeritus Professor Ron Taft.

The Taft Fellowship was introduced last year following a generous gift by Emeritus Professor Ron Taft and the late Mrs Ellen Taft.

It enables Australian-Israeli collaborations through research conducted jointly at universities in both countries.

Professor Taft held the university's Fred Schonell chair of education from 1968 until his retirement in 1981.

Dr Wu, who was nominated for the fellowship by his supervisor, Dr Kiyonori Suzuki from the Department of Materials Engineering, will collaborate with Professor Gad Gorodetsky of Israel's Ben-Gurion University in his research.

He is studying the electro-resistance effect in giant magneto-resistance materials.

"This research is important for the development of next-generation spintronics devices, with major implications for the IT industry," Dr Wu said. "It could, for example, be used in developing new random access memory (RAM)."