Shuji Nakamura

University of California, Santa Barbara

Shuji Nakamura is a Japanese-American engineer and professor of Materials at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He shared the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics with Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes. Working at Nichia Corporation in Japan during the late 1980s and early 1990s, Nakamura made the critical breakthroughs that enabled commercial blue LEDs: he developed a two-flow metalorganic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) reactor for growing high-quality GaN films, discovered thermal annealing as a method for activating p-type GaN, and demonstrated the first high-brightness InGaN double-heterostructure LED. The combination of blue, green, and red LEDs enabled white LED lighting that is now the dominant global technology, dramatically reducing energy consumption for artificial lighting—which accounts for roughly 20% of global electricity use. Nakamura also invented the InGaN blue laser diode that enabled Blu-ray disc technology. After leaving Nichia and joining UCSB, he co-founded Soraa to commercialize GaN-on-GaN LED technology for superior color rendering. He holds over 200 patents and has received numerous awards including the Millennium Technology Prize, the Harvey Prize, and the Global Energy Prize. His entrepreneurial work spans multiple ventures in solid-state lighting and laser technology.