JD Albert

JD Albert (born April 18, 1975) is an American engineer, inventor, and educator. Albert is one of the inventors of microencapsulated electrophoretic display (known as E Ink) commonly used in electronic devices such as e-readers.[1]

In 2016 Albert became one of the youngest inventors ever inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.[2] Albert is named on over 100 US patents.[3] He teaches product development in the University of Pennsylvania's Integrated Product Design (IPD) program.[4]

Career

Along with Barrett Comiskey, he developed the E Ink display. The two invented E Ink while they were undergraduates at MIT. MIT Media Lab professor Joseph Jacobson recruited them to create a technology that mimicked pages in a book.[5] As Albert told Science Friday,[6] "It was ... experimental discovery. ... We had ideas, we were doing a lot of research, reading a lot of patents — many of which were expired patents — recreating experiments, and really, truly forging ahead to make this thing work. It involved a lot of prototypes, and it involved a huge amount of failed experiments." In 1997, after years of research and experimentation, Comiskey and fellow MIT undergraduate JD Albert realized a working prototype.

In 1997, Albert, Comiskey and Jacobson along with Russ Wilcox and Jerome Rubin founded E Ink Corporation.[7]

Albert contributed a chapter on design thinking for early-stage startups to the book Design Thinking: New Product Development Essentials from the PDMA.[8] He has also contributed articles about product development to Entrepreneur[9] and Wired.[10]

Albert is a member of Tau Beta Pi, the engineering honor society.[11]

Personal life and education

Albert has a Bachelor's of Science in Mechanical Engineering[12] from MIT. He lives in Philadelphia.

References

  1. ^ Comiskey, Barrett (18 May 1998). "An electrophoretic ink for all-printed reflective electronic displays". Nature. 394 (6690): 253–255. Bibcode:1998Natur.394..253C. doi:10.1038/28349. S2CID 204998708.
  2. ^ "JD Albert in Inventors Hall of Fame | Bresslergroup News". Retrieved 2016-09-01.
  3. ^ "jdalbert.com". jdalbert.com. Retrieved 2017-03-11.
  4. ^ "JD Albert". ipd.me.upenn.edu.
  5. ^ Primozic, Ursa (27 May 2016). "Interview with Barrett Comiskey". visionect.com. Retrieved 11 March 2017.
  6. ^ "How Electronic Ink Was Invented - Science Friday". Retrieved 2016-09-01.
  7. ^ Klein, Alec (4 January 2000). "A New Printing Technology Sets Off a High-Stakes Race". Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 14 March 2017.
  8. ^ Luchs, Michael G.; Swan, Scott; Griffin, Abbie (2015-11-02). Design Thinking: New Product Development Essentials from the PDMA (1 ed.). Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 9781118971802.
  9. ^ Albert, JD. "JD Albert". Entrepreneur. Retrieved 2016-09-01.
  10. ^ Bresslergroup, JD Albert (13 January 2015). "Not Just for Coders: Hackathons for Hardware Innovation". Wired. Retrieved 2016-09-01.
  11. ^ "TBP Member Search".
  12. ^ "LinkedIn".