Michael L. Mallary is an engineer, physicist, inventor, and author who is noted for his contributions in the areas of magnetic recording and data storage on hard disk drives (HDD).

He attended Archbishop Stepinac High School where he built a Jacob's Ladder and a crude electron microscope as science projects.

He received his Ph.D. degree from the California Institute of Technology in 1971[2] writing a thesis on high-energy physics[3] under the direction of Prof Frank J. Sciulli.

[1] It was during this period that he became involved with the International Storage Industry Consortium (INSIC) on the Extra High Density Recording (EHDR) project[7] working with Mason Williams, Mark Kryder, Dave Thompson and others.

The need for continued increases in areal data density led to an intense focus on perpendicular recording which offered the potential of areal-densities up to 1 Terabit per square inch.

[11] In 2009, Mallary was selected as a Magnetics Society Distinguished Lecturer and gave presentations worldwide with the title "The Evolution and Revolutions in Disk Drive Recording".

[10] Mallary is also the author or coauthor of about 50 technical publications again focussed on magnetic recording for hard disk drives and often in collaboration with academia.

[16] Mallary is the author of a book[17] and a video[18] on cosmology and evolution entitled “Our Improbable Universe: A Physicist Considers How We Got Here” first published in 2004 with a second edition in 2018.