Nick Holonyak

Nick Holonyak Jr. was an American electronics engineer who lived from 1928 to 2022. He is noted particularly for his 1962 invention and first demonstration of a semiconductor laser diode that emitted visible light, a device that was the forerunner of the first generation of commercial light-emitting diodes. He was then working at a General Electric research laboratory near Syracuse, New York. He left General Electric in 1963 and returned to his alma mater, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he later became the John Bardeen Endowed Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering.