Shuji Nakamura

Shuji Nakamura is a Japanese electronics engineer who invented the first practical blue light-emitting diode while working at Nichia Corporation, developing a gallium nitride thin-film growth and thermal annealing method that made mass production possible, entering production in 1993. Blue LEDs had eluded researchers for decades even though red and green versions already existed, and Nakamura's breakthrough completed the set of colors needed to combine with phosphor coatings into practical white LED lighting, a solid-state light source that uses a small fraction of the electricity an incandescent bulb needs for comparable brightness. His invention transformed Nichia's finances, and in 2014 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes, which the Nobel committee credited with enabling bright, energy-saving white light sources.