Storrs Hoen, PhD

Storrs Hoen has led teams that created numerous inventions, from micro motors to the haptics for the Apple Watch.

Hoen was a master scientist and engineer at Apple from 2011 until his retirement in 2022. At Apple, Hoen saw his ideas make it to market, including the MacBook trackpad, he also developed the part of the Apple Pencil that detects how hard you are pressing and worked on the development of the haptics in the Apple Watch and iPhone.

Hoen graduated from Vanderbilt University with degrees in engineering. He studied physics and philosophy at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar before attending the University of California, Berkeley. He received his PhD in condensed matter physics from Berkeley in 1992.

After a postdoc with IBM Almaden, he joined Hewlett Packard and the subsequent spinoff Agilent.