Shuji Nakamura, widely known as the “Thomas Edison of the LED industry” has been named a scientific adviser to the leading global LED manufacturer Seoul Semiconductor Co., Ltd. Nakamura is a professor at the Materials Department of the College of Engineering, University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). He is widely known for having developed the high-brightness blue LED based on GaN in 1993 while working for Nichia Corporation in Japan. In those days, developing a blue LED was considered impossible; only red and green LEDs had been available for the prior 20 years. Prof. Nakamura’s innovation allowed LED manufacturers to produce LEDs with three primary colors (red, green and blue) which could be mixed to express 16 million colors. Perhaps most importantly, the new technology was leveraged by the LED industry to begin commercial production of white LEDs, the semiconductor ecological light source. GaN-based white LED will be an integral part of the global wave of lighting upgrades worldwide. Nakamura is a co-author of “The Blue Laser Diode: The Complete Story” (Springer, 2000). His work is chronicled in the book “Brilliant! Shuji Nakamura And the Revolution in Lighting Technology” by Bob Johnstone (Prometheus Books, 2007).
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