2009 SID Honors and Awards

This year's winners of the Society for Information Display's coveted Honors and Awards include Dr. Peter Raynes, who will receive the Jan Rajchman Prize for his work with twisted-nematic liquid-crystal displays; Dr. Ernst Lueder, who will be awarded the Slottow-Owaki Prize for his contributions as an outstanding and inspiring teacher; and Mr. Peter Baron, who has earned the Lewis and Beatrice Winner Award for years of service to the Society for Information Display.

by Jenny Donelan

EACH YEAR, the Society for Information Display (SID) honors individual scientists and researchers for outstanding achievements in the field of electronic information displays and for outstanding service to the Society. Only a small number of the preeminent members of the industry are nominated and fewer still are finally chosen as recipients. "In our professional lives, there are few greater rewards than recognition by our peers," says Honors and Awards Chair Christopher King. "For an individual in the field of displays, an award or prize from the Society, which represents his or her peers worldwide, is a most significant experience." The winners will be honored during Display Week 2009 at the awards banquet to be held on Monday evening, June 1, preceeding the Symposium.

Jan Rajchman Prize

This award is presented for an outstanding scientific or technical achievement in, or contribution to, research on flat-panel displays.

Dr. Peter Raynes, SID Fellow and Chair of Optoelectronics at Oxford University, has been awarded the Jan Rajchman Prize "for his pioneering work enabling the development of dislocation-free twisted-nematic liquid-crystal displays, fast-responding and thermodynamically stable biphenyl mixtures, and dichroic supertwisted-nematic LCDs."

Dr. Peter Raynes

Dr. Raynes' career spans nearly 40 years and includes more than 120 published papers and over 60 filed patent applications. He played a primary role in developing liquid-crystal displays and was responsible for many key device inventions.

Dr. Raynes began his professional career after graduating from Cambridge University with a Ph.D. in low-temperature physics. In 1971, he joined the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment (now part of QinetiQ) at Malvern, U.K., to work on liquid-crystal materials and devices.

Swiss physicist and inventor Dr. Martin Schadt recalls those times: "I have known Peter as an excellent scientist and good friend since the pioneering days of liquid-crystal field-effect displays and LC-material development in the early 1970s," says Schadt. Only a few years after Schadt and colleague Wolfang Helfrich had patented and published the twisted-nematic (TN) effect in 1970, Dr. Raynes started to do research on the new field effect as a young scientist at the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment. "Being interested in academic and application-related scientific problems," says Schadt, "Peter began researchon the boundary conditions required for optimal operation of TN-LCDs. He discovered the importance of tilted surface alignment for proper static and dynamic operation of TN-LCDs."

Dr. Raynes was ultimately responsible for the invention, patenting, and development of surface-aligning technologies that enabled dislocation-free TN-LCDs; this included a means of preventing tilt as well as twist dislocations. His early work on the causes of surface-induced dislocations in TN-LCDs enabled industry to manufacture optically uniform twisted-nematic LCDs. All future LCD aligning technologies benefited from the aligning technologies he developed, and his aligning concepts were patented and licensed worldwide to the LCD industry.

Dr. Raynes also developed the first commercial cyano-biphenyl mixture, E7. "Following the invention of the cyano- biphenyls by George Gray and co-workers, Peter was the first to apply Schröder Van Laar formalism to determine thermodynamically stable compositions of multi-component liquid-crystal mixtures," says Schadt. "That first cyano-biphenyl mixture, E-7, was successfully commercialized by British Drug Houses (now Merck) and by Roche. E-7 is still a standard mixture for academic research." Last, notes Schadt, "Apart from his work on TN-LCDs, Peter invented the first supertwisted-nematic guest-host LCD in 1982."

In 1992, Dr. Raynes moved to the Sharp Laboratories of Europe, Ltd., at Oxford, U.K., where he was director of research until he took up the chair of optoelectronics in the Department of Engineering Science at Oxford University in 1998.

Slottow-Owaki Prize

Awarded for outstanding contributions to the education and training of students and professionals in the field of information display.

Dr. Ernst Lueder is receiving the Slottow-Owaki Prize "for his many contributions as an outstanding and inspiring teacher, scientist, and mentor for the active-matrix community."

Dr. Ernst Lueder

As a professor at the University of Stuttgart in Germany and the founder of the Flat-Panel Display Laboratory at the University, Dr. Lueder's skills as a gifted and inspiring teacher were instrumental in repeatedly attracting brilliant students to his program. During his tenure, he supervised more than 600 undergraduate research projects, each representing several months of student laboratory work time; more than 630 master thesis research projects, each representing up to one year of research time; as well as 88 Ph.D. thesis projects. To date, 13 of his Ph.D. students have become full professors, with several of them now heading up sizeable research facilities and teams of their own.

Dr. Andras I. Lakatos, Editor of the Journal of the Society for Information Display (JSID), met Lueder almost 30 years ago when Lakatos was manager of TFT-LCD research at the Xerox Corporate Research Center. Ernst proudly showed me his very well-equipped laboratory at the University of Stuttgart," says Lakatos. "But what impressed me the most was how proud he was of the individual members of his research team – the students, post-docs, and others who worked in his group. Later on, I realized that his great intellect always worked in concert with fairness and kindness. This was much appreciated by just about everyone who came in contact with Ernst."

Dr. Lakatos also notes that Dr. Lueder has been Associate Editor of JSID for nearly 10 years. "He works hard to improve the quality of the papers for which he is the technical editor. He always tries to teach the authors how to improve their original manuscripts," says Lakatos. "This is especially important when the authors are graduate students." In fact, Dr. Lueder has donated the $2000 stipend of the Slottow-Owaki Prize to support the annual prize money that is given to the winners of the JSID Annual Outstanding Student Paper Award, notes Lakatos, adding, "This is a much-needed and most generous gift."

Dr. Lueder also conducted a number of SID Symposium short courses over the years and has authored several books, includingLiquid Crystal Displays: Addressing Schemes and Electro-Optical Effects, the most widely sold book of the SID/Wiley series on display technology.

He also founded the Institute of Network and Systems Theory, as well as two major research institutions with extensive clean-room facilities, the aforementioned Flat-Panel Display Laboratory, and the Institute for Microelectronics in Stuttgart, which operates a CMOS line. The Flat Panel Display Laboratory has a class 10-100 clean room that is fully equipped for developing and fabricating AMLCD and AMOLED demonstrators on substrate sizes up to 40 x 40 cm. It has a 17-year track record of developing and demonstrating large-area display demonstrators entirely in-house and is the only university-based laboratory in the U.S. or Europe with this distinction.

Dr. Lueder studied electrical engineering at the University of Stuttgart, receiving a Diplom Ingenieur (comparable to a master's degree) in 1958 and a Ph.D. in 1962. He received his Habilitation (German university teaching credentials) in 1966. In addition to holding assistant and then full professorships at the University, Dr. Lueder was also a member of the technical staff at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey, from 1968 to 1971. He is now retired and has served as President of the Electro Optical Consultancy, which focuses on the display industry, since 2000.

Lewis and Beatrice Winner Award

Awarded for exceptional and sustained service to SID.

Mr. Peter Baron earned this award "for his many years of innovative, tireless, and outstanding service to the Society since its inception in 1962, including his distinctive service to SID in numerous local and international positions."

Mr. Peter Baron

A member of SID since its founding in 1962, Mr. Baron has been active in Society activities since the early eighties. He has served in many capacities, including Program Chair and General Chair for the SID Los Angeles chapter offices. He has also been Director to the International SID Board for the L.A. chapter almost continuously since 1989. Along the way he also served as SID Regional Vice President for the Americas during a period of aggressive growth and internationalization of the Society. As a member of the program committee for the SID annual International Symposium, he spearheaded an effort to expand the scope of the conferences to significantly increase coverage of end-user display applications and later helped to organize the 2004-2006 Americas Display Engineering and Application Conferences (ADEAC). Mr. Baron has been the SID Archives/Historian Chair since 2003. According toInformation Display Executive Editor and SID Director Stephen Atwood, who has worked with Mr. Baron on several endeavors, including the ADEAC conferences, "Peter has worked tirelessly for the betterment of SID and shown his endless devotion to both education and advancement of display technology in everything he has done."

Mr. Baron holds electrical engineering degrees from Purdue University and is the Founder and President of ABCD Technology. •