SID Announces New David Sarnoff Industrial Achievement Prize

The Society for Information Display (SID) has announced the designation of a new award to honor individuals for long-term and significant leadership and/or exceptional contributions to the advancement of the information display industry. The award is named after the late David Sarnoff, a pioneer of American radio and television who served as Radio Corporation of America (RCA) president and chairman for many years.

Mr. Sarnoff, who joined RCA in 1919 and retired in 1970, was a visionary who recognized the long-range potential of numerous radio and television technologies and championed their subsequent development. At RCA, Sarnoff drove R&D and manufacturing of the practical electronic TV system during the 1930s and 1940s, and was also the driving force behind the development of the practical full-color TV system, as demonstrated by researcher Alfred Schroeder’s shadow mask CRT in 1947. Sarnoff was instrumental in the development of flat-panel displays, promoting a research environment that ultimately resulted in the LCD, the thin-film transistor, and active-matrix addressing.

Although David Sarnoff’s contributions to the display industry were considerable, he was also an audio pioneer who helped established the AM radio infrastructure. Here he is shown holding a state-of-the-art RCA transistor radio in 1956.

The David Sarnoff Industrial Achievement Prize is designed to honor outstanding recipients who would not qualify for one of SID’s technical achievement awards but who none-theless have had a profound, positive effect on the display industry over a period of many years, and are broadly recognized across the industry. Winners of the David Sarnoff Industrial Achievement Prize will receive a $2,000 stipend, made possible through the generosity of BOE.

The award joins the lineup of prestigious honors bestowed by SID to outstanding innovators in the field of information displays, including the Karl Ferdinand Braun Prize for outstanding technical achievement in or contribution to display technology; the Jan Rajchman Prize for outstanding scientific or technical achievement in or contribution to research on flat-panel displays; the Otto Schade Prize for outstanding scientific or technical achievement in or contribution to the advancement of the functional performance and/or image quality of information displays; the Slottow-Owaki Prize for outstanding contributions to personnel training in the field of information display; and the Peter Brody Prize to honor young researchers for outstanding contributions to active-matrix-addressed information displays.

The deadline for nominations for the 2018 awards is Oct. 15, 2017. For more information on any of the SID Honors and Awards, including how to submit nominations, please visit www.sid.org/About/Awards/IndividualHonorsandAwards.aspx.  •