Currently, he is an emeritus professor at Paris-Saclay University in Orsay, scientific director of a joint laboratory (Unité mixte de recherche) between the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (National Scientific Research Centre) and Thales Group, and adjunct professor at Michigan State University.

[2] In 1962 Albert Fert graduated from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris,[3] where he attended courses by the physicists Alfred Kastler and Jacques Friedel.

On his return from military service in 1965, Fert became assistant professor at the Orsay Faculty of Sciences of the University of Paris XI (Université Paris-Sud).

In 1988, Albert Fert at Orsay in France, and Peter Gruenberg at Jülich in Germany, simultaneously and independently discovered giant magnetoresistance (GMR) in magnetic multilayers.

Spintronics has already contributed important applications; the introduction of GMR read heads in hard disks has led to a considerable increase in the density of information storage.