Rate My Professor Johan Åkerman

Johan Åkerman is Professor of applied spintronics at the Department of Physics, University of Gothenburg. He obtained his PhD in Materials Physics from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in 1998. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Diego, he joined Motorola, where he spent four years responsible for the reliability of MRAM devices, helping to launch the most commercially successful MRAM technology to date. In 2005, he returned to Sweden to establish his own research group in the Department of Materials and Nanophysics at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. In 2008, he was appointed Full Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Gothenburg, while continuing as Guest Professor at KTH. Since 2023, he has also held the position of Professor and University Research Lead at Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan.

Åkerman's research centers on experimental spintronics, with a particular emphasis on spin torque nano-oscillators and spin Hall nano-oscillators. His work explores new materials and architectures for these devices, electronic circuits, mutual synchronization, magnetodynamical solitons such as magnetic droplets and skyrmions, and large networks of nano-oscillators for neuromorphic computing and solving combinatorial optimization problems using Ising machines. He has published around 350 papers, accumulating over 18,000 citations. Notable publications include "Opportunities and challenges for spintronics in the microelectronics industry" (Nature Electronics, 2020), "Roadmap of spin–orbit torques" (IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, 2021), "Advances in magnetics roadmap on spin-wave computing" (IEEE Transactions on Magnetics, 2022), "Direct observation of a propagating spin wave induced by spin-transfer torque" (Nature Nanotechnology, 2011), and "Spin-torque and spin-Hall nano-oscillators" (Proceedings of the IEEE, 2016). Åkerman has secured major funding, including the Swedish Research Council's Distinguished Professor Grant (32 million SEK, 2025-2032) for research on extremely large networks of extremely small nano-oscillators, an ERC Proof of Concept Grant (2022), and an ERC Consolidator Grant (2019). He served as a member of the Young Academy of Sweden from 2011 to 2016 and is the founder of three spintronics-related startups: NanOsc AB, NanOsc Instruments AB, and Spinwave Computing AB.