Book Shuji Nakamura

Shuji Nakamura, a Japanese American engineer, co-invented the blue LED, the breakthrough that made bright, efficient white LED lighting possible. Born in Ikata in Ehime Prefecture, he earned his engineering degrees at the University of Tokushima and in 1979 joined the Nichia Corporation. There he devised a way to produce the first commercial high-brightness gallium nitride LED, whose blue light, combined with a phosphor coating, became the foundation of white LED lighting, which entered production in 1993. A key step was his thermal annealing method, well suited to mass manufacturing. In 2014 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano for this achievement. Since 1999 he has taught materials science and engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and he co-founded the lighting company Soraa. His many honors include the Millennium Technology Prize (2006), the Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research (2008), the Harvey Prize (2009), the Charles Stark Draper Prize (2015), the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering (2021), Japan's Order of Culture and induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Nakamura shares an inventor's story of persistence and innovation.