Seagate innovator joins elite circle of IEEE Fellows

Seagate’s Ganping Ju is an advanced physicist whose intellectual curiosity extends to material science, mechanical engineering, chemistry and even wireless neural implants.

His interdisciplinary interests have led to major innovations in data storage — and to his election as an IEEE Fellow for 2026.

Elite circle: IEEE Fellows represent the upper, upper echelon of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the world’s largest professional organization dedicated to advancing technology. The number of new Fellows is capped at 0.1% of voting members each year.

IEEE honored Ju “for leadership in heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) media development.” He, in turn, credits the honor to Seagate’s long-standing commitment to innovation.

Academy journey: Ju earned his bachelor’s degree from Peking University in Beijing, China, and later completed his doctorate in physics at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

At Brown, he also worked at an advisor’s lab developing neurograin devices — or implanted brain chips — to help restore motion for people with brain damage. The design of wireless microscale neural implants continues to fascinate him.

Meanwhile, his doctoral research in physics focused on ultrafast spin dynamics — how magnetization in materials can be manipulated at extremely fast timescales. At the time, it was fundamental science. In hindsight, it was a perfect foundation for a career devoted to HAMR.

Ju started at Seagate in 1999 as part of the original HAMR team. Thanks to the pioneering efforts of Ju and his colleagues, Seagate shipped the world’s first commercial HAMR hard drives in 2024.

This technology overcomes a major industry challenge: How can organizations scale storage as AI continues to compound both the volume and long-term value of data?

Conventional technology had reached its limits at around 30TB per hard drive — not enough to keep pace with today’s furious build-out of exabyte-scale data centers.

By contrast, Seagate has engineered HAMR to more than double current capacities. The company already sells 36TB HAMR drives and expects to demonstrate 100TB per drive by 2033.

Masterpiece and milestone: Ju describes HAMR as “a masterpiece, combining the fascinating fields of optics, magnetism, electronics, nanomaterial science, mechanical engineering and chemistry.”

Its development stemmed from the dedication of many talented colleagues and the “fruitful collaborations” between industrial and academic researchers, he says.

“HAMR is a major milestone for data storage and society by providing unprecedented capacities to address the growing demand from the digital economy and artificial intelligence in a most cost-effective way.”

What’s next? Ju is working with the Seagate media team on developing key building blocks to extend HAMR to 100TB per drive.

“Over the next five to 10 years, we need to push toward the ultimate limits of HAMR in combinations of various creative recording schemes to make every bit and every grain count for storing information,” he says.

Longer term, the next disruptive masterpiece is right in Ju’s cross-functional wheelhouse. “We’re already exploring what’s beyond HAMR and magnetic recording, whether it’s optical, ferroelectric or biological data storage.”

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