Kish named National Academy of Inventors Fellow
Fred Kish, M.C. Dean Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at North Carolina State University, has been named as a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) in its 2021 class.
Kish, who joined the NC State faculty in 2019, is also the director of NC State’s Nanofabrication Facility. His research interests are in photonic integrated circuits, light-emitting diodes and Al-bearing III-V native-oxide technology.
The NAI Fellows Program highlights academic inventors who have demonstrated a spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on the quality of life, economic development and the welfare of society. Election to NAI Fellow is the highest professional distinction accorded solely to academic inventors.
From 1992-1999, Kish was at Hewlett-Packard, where he co-invented and led the commercialization of the highest performance (efficiency) red-orange-yellow visible LEDs produced at the time (wafer-bonded transparent-substrate AlGaInP LEDs). The efficiencies of these devices exceeded those of incandescent and halogen lamps with products based on this technology resulting in over $2B in revenue to date. From 1999-2001, he was with Agilent Technologies as the III-V Department Manager.
In 2001, he joined Infinera Corporation, where he co-invented and led the effort to research, develop and commercialize the first practical (commercially deployed) large-scale PICs and first commercial fully integrated system-on-a-chip for optical communications. The large-scale InP PICs are at the core of Infinera’s optical network products and have been the enabling technology behind over $4B in PIC-based networking product sales. He served as senior vice president of the Optical Integrated Circuit Group at Infinera prior to joining NC State as the director of the NC State Nanofabrication Facility.
Kish is also a Fellow of the OSA and IEEE and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. His awards include the IEEE David Sarnoff Award, the IEEE LEOS Engineering Achievement Award, the OSA Adolph Lomb Award and the International Symposium on Compound Semiconductors Young Scientist Award. He has co-authored more than 125 U.S. patents, more than 150 peer-reviewed journal and conference publications and four book chapters on optoelectronic devices and materials.
To date, NAI Fellows hold more than 48,000 issued U.S. patents, which have generated over 13,000 licensed technologies and companies and created more than one million jobs. In addition, over $3 trillion in revenue has been generated based on NAI Fellow discoveries.
Kish is the 10th current or emeritus faculty member in the College of Engineering at NC State to be named as an NAI Fellow.
This post was originally published in College of Engineering News.
