Dr. Hiroaki Muraoka graduated from the Department of Communications Engineering in the School of Engineering at Tohoku University in 1976 and received his doctorate in engineering from Tohoku University in 1981. After graduating from graduate school, he joined Matsushita Communication Industrial Co., Ltd., where he was involved in research and development of flexible disk drives. In 1991, he was hired as an assistant professor at the Research Institute of Electrical Communication at Tohoku University. After serving as an associate professor, he was promoted to professor in 2000 and took charge of the field of information storage research. Since 2010, he has also been Director of the Research Center for 21st Century Information Technology attached to the Research Institute of Electrical Communication at Tohoku University, making significant contributions to research and education. In 2018, he was awarded the title of Professor Emeritus of Tohoku University.

He first encountered perpendicular magnetic recording, which had just been invented in the Shunichi Iwasaki Laboratory of the Research Institute of Electrical Communication at Tohoku University. For more than 40 years since then, he has been consistently engaged in research on perpendicular magnetic recording and its application to hard disk drives and information storage systems. He has worked on improving the high-density recording performance of magnetic heads and disks, which are the most important elements in magnetic recording. He significantly improved recording performance by fundamentally revising the magnetic pole structure of perpendicular magnetic heads and demonstrated recording with the narrowest recording track width at that time. Regarding perpendicular magnetic disks, he has researched high-density recording based on recording and reproduction theory, such as proposing a noise reduction method based on analysis of the nano-sized fine magnetic structure of the recording magnetic layer. Furthermore, he demonstrated excellent high-density recording performance and good error rate characteristics by prototyping the recording head as a practical flying head for hard disk drives. This was the result of experimentally verifying the practical high-density recording performance of perpendicular magnetic recording, which attracted international attention and accelerated the trend of transitioning from conventional longitudinal magnetic recording to perpendicular magnetic recording.

After perpendicular magnetic recording was put to practical use in 2005, he continued research of next-generation high-density recording. He revealed the possibility of achieving several times higher recording density using a novel bit pattern type perpendicular magnetic recording medium. He has also been involved in research on information storage systems that take advantage of the high-capacity performance of perpendicular magnetic recording hard disk drives and has developed technologies for information systems with excellent power-saving performance and disaster resistance.

For these achievements in research and social contributions, he received the IEICE's Achievement Award, the IEICE's Electronics Society Award, the title of Fellow of the IEICE and IEEE, the Magnetics Society of Japan Achievement Award, and the Japan Broadcasting Corporation Broadcast Cultural Award. He has also contributed significantly to developing electronic information technology by serving as a member of academic societies and committees in related fields in Japan and abroad. In Japan, he served as a member of committees and councils of public organizations such as the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, and the Japan Broadcasting Corporation, and as an officer of the IEICE and many other academic societies. In particular, he was active in the 144th Committee on Magnetic Recording of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, which was the center for industry-academia collaborative research on perpendicular magnetic recording, and regularly held international conferences on perpendicular magnetic recording under the chairmanship of Shunichi Iwasaki. He also served on many committees of international academic societies and made significant contributions to the development of the academic world on a global scale.

As described above, his contributions to technological innovation in the field of electronics, information and communications, with a focus on perpendicular magnetic recording, as well as in the field of information storage systems, have been highly significant. We are confident that he is worthy of the IEICE Honorary Member title and recommend him for it.