Illustration of the German physicist Peter Grunberg (1939-2018). Grunberg was born in what is now the Czech Republic, moving with his family to Germany after World War II. He obtained his doctorate in 1969 from the Darmstadt University of Technology. His career involved studying solid-state physics and thin film and multilayer magnetism. In 1998, he discovered a quantum mechanical phenomenon called giant magnetoresistance. This has applications in advanced hard disk drive technology. For this work, Grunberg shared the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics.