Awarded annually by the Technion Israel Institute of Technology,
which announced the winners this week, the prize will be
presented at a ceremony on the university's campus in Haifa,
Israel, on February 17. The other 2009 winner is Sir David
Baulcombe, a botanist and research professor at the University
of Cambridge in Britain. Nakamura is a professor of materials in
the College of Engineering at UCSB, where he also is co-director
of the Solid State Lighting and Energy Center. He is
internationally known for his invention of revolutionary new
light sources: blue, green, and white light-emitting diodes and
the blue laser diode. He and a UCSB team also developed the
world's first nonpolar blue-violet laser diodes. According to
the prize announcement issued by the Technion, Nakamura was
chosen for the Harvey Prize for "his seminal contributions to
light sources based on nitride containing III-V semiconductors.
Professor Nakamura pioneered the research that led to the first
semiconductor laser producing blue emis