email Prof. Forrest at "stevefor at umich dot edu"
Steve Forrest, Peter A. Franken Distinguished University Professor and Paul G. Goebel Professor of Engineering, is a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Physics, and Materials Science and Engineering. He is director of the Optoelectronic Components and Materials Group. He and his group conduct research on photovoltaic cells, organic light emitting diodes, and lasers & optics. His investigations in these areas span decades, and have resulted in five startup companies, 385 issued patents, 664 peer-reviewed publications with more than 175,000 citations, and key technologies that are pervasive in the marketplace. In addition, he has graduated 63 Ph.D. students.
Education: B. A. Physics, 1972, University of California, MSc and PhD Physics in 1974 and 1979, University of Michigan.
Career: At Bell Labs, he investigated photodetectors for optical communications. In 1985, Prof. Forrest joined the Electrical Engineering and Materials Science Departments at USC where he worked on optoelectronic integrated circuits, and organic semiconductors. In 1992, Prof. Forrest became the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University. He served as director of the National Center for Integrated Photonic Technology, and as Director of Princeton's Center for Photonics and Optoelectronic Materials (POEM) and, from 1997-2001, he chaired Princeton’s Electrical Engineering Department. In 2006, he rejoined the University of Michigan as Vice President for Research, and returned to research and teaching full time in 2014.
Prof. Forrest is a Fellow of APS, IEEE and OSA and a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Inventors. He received the IEEE/LEOS Distinguished Lecturer Award in 1996-97, and in 1998 he was co-recipient of the IPO National Distinguished Inventor Award as well as the Thomas Alva Edison Award for innovations in organic LEDs. In 1999, Prof. Forrest received the MRS Medal for work on organic thin films. In 2001, he was awarded the IEEE/LEOS William Streifer Scientific Achievement Award for advances made on photodetectors for optical communications systems. In 2006 he received the Jan Rajchman Prize from the Society for Information Display for the invention of phosphorescent OLEDs, and is the recipient of the 2007 IEEE Daniel Nobel Award for innovations in OLEDs. Prof. Forrest has been honored by Princeton University establishing the Stephen R. Forrest Endowed Faculty Chair in Electrical Engineering in 2012 and was awarded the 2017 IEEE Jun-ichi Nishizawa Medal.
Prof. Forrest has authored ~620 papers in refereed journals, with an h-index of 148 and over 107,000 citations. He is co-founder or founding participant in several companies, including Sensors Unlimited, Epitaxx, Inc., NanoFlex Power Corp. (OTC: OPVS), Universal Display Corp. (NASDAQ: OLED) and Apogee Photonics, Inc., and is on the Growth Technology Advisory Board of Applied Materials. He is past Chairman of the Board of the University Musical Society and served as Chairman of the Board of Ann Arbor SPARK, the regional economic development organization. He serves on the Board of Governors of the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology where he is a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Electrical Engineering and received an honorary doctorate from the Technion in 2018. He was named the University of Michigan Distinguished University Innovator in 2015 and the Henry Russell Lectureship in 2019. His first book, Organic Electronics: Foundations to applications, was published in September, 2020, by Oxford University Press.
