Prof Ching Tang, Chair Professor of Electronic and Computer Engineering, has received the 2014 OSA Holonyak Award from the Optical Society of America.

The Nick Holonyak Jr. Award, established in 1997, honors Nick Holonyak Jr., who has made distinguished contributions to the field of optics through the development of semiconductor based light emitting diodes and semiconductor lasers. The award is presented to an individual who has made significant contributions to optics based on semiconductor-based optical devices and materials, including basic science and technological applications.

About Prof Ching Tang

Prof Tang attended and graduated from the Department of Chemistry at the University of British Columbia in 1970. After receiving his PhD in Physical Chemistry in Cornell University in 1975, he joined Eastman Kodak and was charged with developing organic semiconductors and the electronic appliances. In 2003, he was named Distinguished Fellow of the Kodak Research Laboratories. From 2006 onwards, he has been the Doris Johns Cherry Professor at the University of Rochester.

A co-inventor of the tiny molecule that emits light with Prof Steven A Van Slyke in 1987, Prof Tang was hailed as the father of OLED. He was also the discoverer of ‘organic heterojunction’ in the early 1980s, a structure considered to be the most important discovery in the field of organic electronics that forms the basis for the successful development of OLED as a display technology. Prof Tang has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships. He was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1998 and Fellow of the US National Academy of Engineering in 2006. He also reaped Eastman Kodak Innovation Award (2000), the Jack Rajchman Prize of the Society of Information Display (2001), the Rochester Law Association Inventor of the Year Award (2002) and the Humboldt Research Award (2005). In 2010, he was conferred the honorary doctorate by the Shanghai University.

Prof Tang’s many honors culminated in his being made the first Chinese Wolf Prize Laureate in Chemistry in 2011 for his seminal research contributions. Established in 1976, the Wolf Prizes are annually awarded to outstanding individuals for their major contributions to arts and sciences – in the fields of Agriculture, Chemistry, Mathematics, Medicine, Physics and Arts. The Wolf Prize is second only to the Nobel Prize in world prestige.