Lead a WW cross-functional team to drive quality and reliability of ePMR technology with 50+ members from head and media design, Hard Disk Drive (HDD) integration, quality, Materials Lab, firmware, test development, pilot line, new product introduction, and factory• Delivered the industry’s first ePMR product for datacenter customers (Tier 1 Cloud computing companies) and significantly improved company technology competitiveness, resulting in $1B revenue gain and 8% gross margin gain in 2 quarters since customer adoption.• Significantly improved team harmony, capability, and effectiveness with a pragmatic/data-driven approach and by being the sole owner for the entire product cycle• Lead the creation of a lifetime test ecosystem from the ground up, including methodology, failure acceleration schemes, software and WW logistics for evaluating experimental HDDs in high volume in US and JP pilot lines, enabling large sample-size real-life evaluation • Drove the fundamental understanding and improvement of ePMR reliability through design of experiments, failure analysis (performance metrics, Auger, AFM, SEM, TEM, Raman), and proprietary data analytics (JMP, Reliasoft using Weibull)• Lead the development of customer qualification specs and the creation of new high-volume HDD manufacturing quality monitoring procedures• Lead evaluations of external suppliers’ ePMR technology to augment supply volume, developed solutions to improve its lifetime, qualified it for production• Drive quality monitoring procedures at component factories in Asia to enhance production predictability

Ran TM design and integration team with 10+ members and transformed it into a focused, effective, champion team • Delivered 3 generations of PMR TM solutions (500GB, 750GB, 1TB/pp), which brought in >$10B revenue, and the 1st generation Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) TM design through design modeling (SolidWorks, Ansys), rigorous wafer and backend DOEs, data analytics, and failure analysis• Continued ownership throughout manufacturing, improved manufacturability and yield• Launched company’s first dual independent spacing control product, increasing capacity and improved reader reliability• Launched WD’s first product with a thermal sensor to improve reliability

Built and ran an effective CMP development team from the ground up • Led the successful development of 2.2T and 2.4T CMP processes, eliminated corrosion-induced failures, enabling the launch of PMR products, resulting in >$1B revenue• Drove the development of leading shield and leading-edge taper CMP process, increased capacity by 10~20%• Led the qualification of new generations of CMP tools, enhancing uniformity and protrusion controllability

Developed and launched new disk defect detection technology, techniques to characterize disk nano/microwaviness/flatness, and techniques to predict disk magnetic performance based on surface texture, and an innovative method to apply surface texture