Paul André Albert, (born April 14, 1926) is metallurgist living in San Jose, California. In the 1970s and 1980s, he helped to develop the class of doped cobalt-chrome alloys still in use in the manufacture of computer hard disks.
He was born in Van Buren, Maine, to Doctor Armand Albert and Marie Lussier Albert, and is a direct descendant of Canadian pioneer Pierre Boucher. Albert earned a BS in physics from the University of Maine at Orono and an ScD in Metallurgy from New York University. During his career at Westinghouse in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and then at IBM in Poughkeepsie, New York, in Essex Junction, Vermont and in San Jose, Albert co-authored several other patents on the production of anisotropic magnetic films and the means of recording and reading data in them. Albert also contributed to early work on high-density perpendicular recording.
After retiring from IBM in 1982, Albert began manufacturing research alloys for disk drive manufacturers such as IBM, Western Digital and Seagate. In 1985, Albert incorporated under the name ACI Alloys, and the company continues to operate today. During the 1990s, researchers at ACI Alloys expanded to other thin film markets by developing techniques for the casting of sputtering targets made of unstable alloys such as manganese-zinc-selenium., and Germanium Antimony Telluride
Albert has been married to Jeanne Albert since 1955. They have eight children.