Jan Rajchmann Award for OLED Professor Karl Leo
Press release - April 13, 2021
Physicist Prof. Dr. Karl Leo of Technische Universität Dresden is the first German scientist to receive the Jan Rajchmann Award from the U.S. Society for Information Display (SID). With the award, SID recognizes Leo’s „pioneering work on OLED displays, in particular the introduction of stable and controlled doping of organic semiconductors for highly efficient OLED displays.“
Prof. Karl Leo, director of the Institute of Applied Physics at TU Dresden is a semiconductor physicist at heart. His main interests are novel semiconductor systems such as semiconducting organic thin films, with a special focus on understanding fundamental device principles and their optical response.
He has been fascinated by organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) since seeing his first one in 1991. After Leo was appointed professor of optoelectronics at TU Dresden in 1993, he began basic research on organic semiconductors. He was convinced there was a technical way to make OLEDs better and perhaps a commercial opportunity if he got it right. And he was right. Together with his doctoral students Martin Pfeiffer and Jan Blochwitz, he worked on the controlled doping of organic semiconductors. It was a project that initially met with much skepticism among experts.
In 2001, Leo founded the OLED materials supplier Novaled with Pfeiffer and Blochwitz, which was later acquired by Samsung and is considered one of the most successful German start-ups. In the meantime, OLED components created on the drawing board at TU Dresden can be found in almost every cell phone and soon in every television screen around the world.
With the Jan Rajchmann Prize, his work now also receives international recognition and gives Saxony worldwide visibility as a competitive location for micro- and nanoelectronics.
Contact:
Prof. Dr. Karl Leo
Institute of Applied Physics
TU Dresden
Email: karl.leo@tu-dresden.de