The New World of Lighting: SSL and Beyond

Solid-state lighting has made tremendous progress this past decade, with the potential to make much more progress this coming decade. In this talk, we review the current status of solid-state lighting relative to its ultimate potential to be ultra-efficient, smart, and connected, and thus to enable a new world of lighting that goes beyond simple solid-state lighting for illumination.

Jeff Tsao is a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories. His career has thus far spanned four phases. From 1981 to 1991, he was research staff, first at MIT-Lincoln Laboratory then at Sandia National Laboratories, where his studied laser microchemistry and the materials science of strained heterostructures, culminating in his research monograph "Materials Fundamentals of Molecular Beam Epitaxy." From 1991 to 2001, he was research manager at Sandia National Laboratories, then, while on entrepreneurial leave, was Vice-President of R&D at E2O Communications, a U.S.-based pre-IPO fiber communications company. From 2001 to 2009, he played a "community organizer" role, returning to Sandia National Laboratories as research staff but with a much broader focus, spearheading white papers and reports which set larger national and global research strategies and directions, including in solid-state lighting. Beginning in 2009, Jeff returned to research, serving from 2009 to 2014 as Chief Scientist of Sandia's Energy Frontier Research Center for Solid-State-Lighting Science, and beginning to explore the "science of science" "“ harnessing emerging social and complexity science to treat research itself as a complex adaptive (and learning) system.