David Wachenschwanz is vice president of New Product Design and Integration for the Media Operations division of Western Digital. He was part of Komag, Inc. for the past 17 years until it was acquired by WD. His responsibilities include managing the qualification and integration of thin film recording media into new drive programs as well as developing future generation media technology. He has been involved in the magnetic recording industry for more than 23 years. He has numerous technical publications regarding recording heads, media, recording physics and discrete track recording and has given many talks on these topics for conferences, seminars and short courses. He holds a Master of Science degree in applied physics from the University of California at San Diego where he did his thesis work at the Center for Magnetic Recording Research and a Bachelor of Science degree in physics from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. He is a senior member of the IEEE.