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A significant portion of Expert's career has been spent on hard disks and hard disk technology, including both particulate and metallic magnetic coatings. His experience includes the magnetics of disk coatings, their testing and measurement, and the head disk interface. It includes establishing magnetic disk design parameters as well as recording performance prediction. He is familiar with almost all of the processes in disk manufacturing, including spin coating, orientation, polishing, sputtering, and plating, as well as most of the mechanical measurements required (profilometry, acceleration, flying height).

A significant portion of Expert's career has been spent on disk drives, mostly hard disk drives. However, he is also familiar with floppy disk drives and many of their problems. Most of his experience has been with heads, disks, the head disk interface, and with read/write systems, including electronics, data codes, error rate prediction, and performance criteria. He has designed state-of-the-art disk drives, and worked on them as a R/W engineer in design, planning, and troubleshooting and "fixing" problem products. He has published several papers on drive error rate prediction and R/W concepts. For several years he has maintained predictions on disk drive markets and anticipated needs.


A significant portion of Expert's career has been spent working on magnetic recording heads, and most recently on thin-film heads. He has been fortunate to work with two of the most successful, thin-film head development groups and has acquired a significant amount of processing and development knowledge and experience. He is also quite familiar with the application and testing of magnetic recording heads of all types, specifically including ferrite, MIG, and thin-film. He is also knowledgeable in the magnetics of most materials used in heads of all types today. He has had experience with audio, video, digital, and flying heads in manufacturing, test, and drive design.


A significant portion of Expert's early career in magnetic recording was spent in magnetic recording tape research and development. The basic coating formulation materials are still the same with most of the improvements coming in new particles and thin coating techniques. Floppy disks are a hybrid between tape media and a disk application. He has kept abreast of most of the significant improvements in tape and tape recording materials, since several of his first papers were on tape and particle orientation. He also developed a digital amplitude reference tape for testing in a manufacturing environment. He also participated in a group attempting to establish archival standards for tape storage.

Magnetic recording read/write circuitry requires a significant background in magnetic recording theory and practice, high speed analog and digital circuitry (most of what would be known as electronic engineering), low noise circuitry, and specialized filters (both active and passive). A knowledge of magnetic media characteristics (signals, noise, error sources, and defects), effects of external noise sources and fields is needed, as well as their effect on drive error rate. He has worked in the R/W area in design, development, and fixed problem drives, as well as published papers on R/W theory and error rate prediction.