Who are this year’s Nobel Laureates in Physics and Chemistry and what did they win the prize for? Here you will find background on the most recent Laureates as well as explanations of their Nobel Prize winning work and its implications for future scientific developments.

The 2007 Chemistry Laureate Gerhard Ertl was awarded the Nobel Prize for groundbreaking studies of chemical processes on solid surfaces. Ertl made important advances that will help the chemical industry understand different processes such as why iron rusts and how fuel cells function.

The 2007 Physics Laureates Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg were awarded the Nobel Prize for discovering a completely new physical effect called Giant Magnetoresistance or GMR. This GMR system is the perfect tool for reading data on hard disk. Fert and Grünberg were able to change the way computers look and function.