Vice President of Research and Development, Western Digital
Richard New has served as the vice president of research and development at Western Digital since 2016 where he oversees the company’s advanced research across a range of topics relating to storage, memory and compute. In this role, he manages the Western Digital Research Lab, focusing on exploratory research and advanced technology development in emerging non-volatile memories, microprocessor architecture (RISC-V), storage and memory interface standards, advanced storage architecture concepts and prototyping, and open source software projects relating to storage and memory architecture. Prior to this, he was the lab director of San Jose Research Center at Hitachi GST (now Western Digital), working on advanced magnetic recording technologies such as heat-assisted magnetic recording, as well as advanced storage architecture concepts. Previously, Richard held a variety of research and manager roles at IBM Research where he worked in the areas of magnetic recording, signal processing and error correction. Richard received a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo, and an MS and PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. Richard was born in Cambridge England and grew up in Waterloo Canada. He currently resides in Palo Alto with his family and enjoys working on robotics and go-carts with his kids.
