Daniel Worledge

Daniel Worledge is a Distinguished Research Staff Member and the Senior Manager of MRAM at the IBM Almaden Research Center. He leads teams in Yorktown Heights and Albany in New York, and in San Jose in California, doing scientific research and technology development of magnetoresistive random access memory (MRAM). From 2000 to 2015, Dr. Worledge worked at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center, where he made the first perpendicular CoFeB|MgO tunnel junctions and led the IBM team that demonstrated the first integrated perpendicular Spin-Transfer-Torque MRAM, with ultra-low write-error-rate. In 2001 he invented and developed Current-in-Plane Tunneling as a fast turn-around measurement method for magnetic tunnel junctions. Dr. Worledge received a BA with a double major in Physics and Applied Mathematics from UC Berkeley in 1995, receiving the Department Scholar Award in physics and the Dorothea Klumpke Roberts Prize in mathematics. He then received a PhD in Applied Physics from Stanford University in 2000, with a thesis on spin-polarized tunneling in oxide ferromagnets, measuring the largest tunneling spin-polarization in (LaSr)MnO3 and the first negative tunneling spin-polarization in SrRuO3. He received the 2025 IEEE Cledo Brunetti Award, four IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards, three IBM Outstanding Innovation Awards, and the IBM Research Client Award. Dr. Worledge is a Fellow of APS and IEEE, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.