Paul Grant (physicist)

Grant joined IBM Poughkeepsie, NY in 1953 working as a technician on the SAGE computer defense system.[8] He was able to take advantage of IBM's educational leave-of-absence program to obtain a BS degree from Clarkson and a Ph.D. from Harvard.[9] In 1957, he filed a patent[10] that is cited as a precursor to the magnetoresistive head used universally in magnetic recording. In 1965, he moved to IBM Research – Almaden. At IBM, Grant was among the team researching superconductivity in the material Yttrium Barium Copper Oxide (YBCO) and found it to exhibit superconductivity at temperatures as high as 90 K.[2] This was some of first evidence that superconductivity could be supported at temperatures above the boiling point of Nitrogen, a common cryogenic refrigerant.
In 1987-88, with guidance from Grant, his 8th-grade daughter, Heidi, and then subsequently a science class at Gilroy High School were able to show the relative ease with which high temperature superconductors could be fabricated and demonstrated[11][12][13]
From 1990-93, Grant was a “visiting faculty researcher” at the Instituto de Investigationes Materiales (IIM), National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), where he carried out numerical studies on the properties of rare earth copper oxides. From 1993 to 2004, Grant was a Science Fellow with the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). From 2005 to 2008, he was a Visiting Scholar in Applied Physics at Stanford University
In 2004, he started his own consulting business.[1][5] Grant has long been an advocate for commercial applications of superconductivity.[14][15] He is a popular science writer[11][16][17][18] and has been prolific author of scientific papers and patents.[19][20] Grant is a member of the Storage Interest Group[21] at the Computer History Museum.

In 2000, a patent dispute over the invention of YBCO dating back to March 1987 was finally resolved. The dispute was between IBM’s Almaden Research Center, the US Naval Research Laboratory, the University of Houston, and Bell Labs. Ultimately, Bell Labs. prevailed and was granted the US patent based on priority date (date of invention rather than the current criterion of date of filing)[22][23]

Grant became a Senior Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1998 "For contributions to the fields of organic conductors and high temperature superconductivity".[24] He became a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, United Kingdom, in Nov 2004. In 2013, Grant was chosen as American Physical Society Distinguished Lecturer on the Applications of Physics.[25] Grant is one of Clarkson University's "Notable Knights".[26]