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Born in Zhovkva, Ukraine (then part of Poland), Romankiw emigrated to Canada, where he attained citizenship and earned his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering. After earning a master’s and Ph.D. in metallurgy and materials in 1962 from MIT, he joined IBM.

At that time, IBM’s mainframes relied on drum storage for memory, which was slow, heavy, expensive, and limited to a few hundred kilobytes. In the 1970s, Romankiw partnered with co-worker David Thompson to invent magnetic thin film storage heads. The innovation spanned almost a dozen patents that reduced the size and increased the density of data storage devices. Any modern device that uses magnetic-head hard drives (as opposed to solid-state drives) still employs Romankiw’s innovations. His work earned him a place in the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2012.

Romankiw spent his entire career at IBM, earning the rank of IBM Fellow in 1986. He also became a Fellow of the Electrochemical Society in 1990. Among Romankiw’s other developments and 65 patents were inductive power converters and inductors for high-efficiency solar cells.

He was 93 when he passed.