"Ten years ago,Adekunle Adeyeye left his computer-programming job in Ibadan, Nigeria, to get a master’s in microelectronics engineering at the University of Cambridge in England.Despite a rocky start,he finished atop his class.He joined the physics PhD program at the university’s Cavendish Laboratory,where he researched magnetism in thin films.He then became the first Nigerian elected as a prestigious junior research fellow of Trinity College at Cambridge.There,Adeyeye devised nanofabrication techniques that allowed him to create novel nano magnets.His mentor,physicist Stephen Julian, attributes Adeyeye’s success to “tremendous energy and creativity.”Today Adeyeye is a founding researcher at the $10 million Information Storage Materials Laboratory at the National University of Singapore,where he works in the field of “spintronics.”Conventional electronics take advantage of the charge of electrons in semiconducting materials.But electrons also have a property called “spin.”If Adeyeye succeeds in better utilizing electron spin,he could help revolutionize memory and logic devices,leading to smaller,faster and less power-hungry computers."
