About the speaker: Shuji Nakamura obtained B.E., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tokushima in 1977, 1979, and 1994, respectively. He joined Nichia Chemical Industries Ltd in 1979. Since 2000, he has been a professor of Materials and Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the Research Director of the Solid State Lighting & Energy Electronics Center and the Cree Chair in Solid State Lighting & Displays. He co-founded Soraa, Inc. in 2008, which operates vertically integrated fabrication facilities in California’s Silicon Valley and Santa Barbara.
In 1989 he started the research of blue LEDs using group-III nitride materials. In 1990, he developed a novel MOCVD system for GaN growth, named as Two-Flow MOCVD, which was the biggest breakthrough in his GaN-based research. In 1991, he originally obtained p-type GaN films by thermal annealing and clarified the Hydrogen passivation as a hole compensation mechanism. In 1992, he grew the first InGaN single crystal layers which have been used for an emitting layer of all of the blue/green/white LEDs and the violet/blue/green semiconductor lasers. In 1993 and 1995 he developed the first group-III nitride-based high-brightness blue/green LEDs and violet laser diodes (LDs). In 1996, Nichia started selling white LEDs based on his invention of blue LEDs. These white LEDs have been used for all kinds of lighting applications in order to save energy consumptions. In 1999, Nichia started selling the violet laser diodes for the application of blue-ray DVDs.
Prof. Nakamura holds more than 200 US patents and over 300 Japanese patents, and has published over 550 papers. He has received numerous awards, including the Nishina Memorial Award (1996), the Materials Research Society Medal Award (1997), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Jack A. Morton Award, the British Rank Prize (1998), the Benjamin Franklin Medal Award (2002), the Millennium Technology Prize (2006), the Czochralski Award (2007), the Prince of Asturias Award for Technical Scientific Research (2008), the Harvey Award (2009), and the Technology & Engineering Emmy Award (2012). He was elected as a fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 2003. He was the 2014 Nobel Laureate in Physics for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources. He received the 2014 Order of Culture Award in Japan, and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2015. He received the 2015 Charles Stark Draper Prize for Engineering and the 2015 Global Energy Prize in Russia.
