Albert S. Hoagland is Director of the INSTITUTE FIR INFORMATION STORAGE TECHNOLOGY (IIST) at Santa Clara University, and a professor of Electrical Engineering in the School of Engineering.

On the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his Ph.D., Dr. Hoagland consulted with and then joined IBM, assuming key responsibilities on the first magnetic disk drive, the RAMAC. He made major contributions to magnetic data recording technology and the design of magnetic disk drives, holding many major positions in both research and development. With IBM for many years, he also served as a senior technical consultant in Europe, Director for Technical Planning for the IBM Research Division, led an inter-divisional program on mass storage and later played a principal role in the formation and leadership of an Industry/University consortium that established the first University Centers in data storage technology. He took early retirement from IBM to join Santa Clara University where he founded the Institute for Information Storage Technology. A Fellow of the IEEE, he is a past president of the IEEE Computer Society, the American Federation of Information Processing Societies, serves on the TMRC Advisory Committee and is a trustee of the Charles Babbage Foundation for the History of Computing.

Dr. Hoagland is author of the well-known book "Digital Magnetic Recording" (1st and 2nd editions) as well as numerous publications in the field of magnetic recording and data storage, including a seminal paper on "Magnetic Data Recording Theory, Head Design" that received an IEEE award.