Michael Kitcher

Michael D. Kitcher is a School of Engineering Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow whose research examines spin transport and chiral interactions in magnetic materials with the goal of developing next-generation spintronic devices. Specifically, Michael’s work is centered on understanding and manipulating noncollinear spin textures—such as domain walls, spin waves, and skyrmions—which hold great promise as building blocks for energy-efficient spintronics. For his doctoral research, he studied the interplay between the Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya Interaction (DMI)—a critical property for various proposed magnetic memory systems—and different forms of reduced symmetry in ferromagnetic multilayer thin films. As a postdoctoral fellow, Michael is investigating superfluid spin transport in magnetic insulators and characterizing the behavior of the spin spirals that mediate this process. Beyond developing new approaches to maximize the efficiency of spin superfluidity in nonlocal devices, he continues to pursue his interests in observing and harnessing chiral phenomena that emerge at the intersection of structural and dynamic symmetry breaking in magnetic thin films. Michael’s research has the potential to deliver important advances in our understanding of magnetic materials and birth impactful technologies that address far-reaching societal issues, such as the surging energy demands of computing.