U engineering professor Gerald Stringfellow was awarded the Pioneers of Progress Award for Science and Technology Development during a Days of ’47 event earlier this summer.
“It’s quite prestigious,” said Stringfellow, who has been at the U for 27 years. He was once the dean of the College of Engineering and now teaches classes and conducts research.
Stringfellow first became interested in science after collecting Popsicle wrappers to trade for a chemistry set when he was in fifth grade. Now, Stringellow teaches material science, electrical and computer engineering and works on light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, which can be used instead of light bulbs.
“(LEDs) last virtually forever, certainly more than ten years, and they’re safer (than light bulbs),” Stringfellow said.
Stringfellow said that someday LEDs will replace light bulbs because they use one-fifteenth the amount of power. He was the first person who recognized the material LEDs are composed of and the first person to use the process by which they are made — Organometalic Vapor Phase Epitaxy. OMVPE is also used to make solar cells.
Stringfellow works mostly with amber and red LEDs.
“There is nothing hot (in LEDs); there’s no filament,” he said. Instead, LEDs work by passing an electrical current through a crystal, which changes the electrons into photons. The technology exists today in traffic lights.
Stringfellow first proposed the idea when he worked for Hewlett-Packard in 1975. However, the company felt the material was uncertain to succeed. Stringfellow then came to the U and began researching.
The current dean of the engineering department, Richard Brown, was once a student in Stringfellow’s class. Brown said Stringfellow was one of the best professors he had and that it was an honor to follow him as dean. He said Stringfellow is a model faculty member, teacher, researcher and academic leader.
Marilyn Davies, development director at the College of Engineering, said Stringfellow has always been calm and collected, even at points of high stress.
“He was the perfect dean, always willing to do whatever it took to get the job done,” Davies said. “Jerry (Stringfellow) is a great sport and a wonderful man.”
Stringfellow has also been elected to the National Academy of Engineering, which consists of 600 people in the United States. He has won the Rosenblatt Prize and has received the Crystal Growth Award, the Alexander Von Humboldt U.S. Senior Science Award, the James Bardeen Award and the Governor’s Medal for Science and Technology. He was named distinguished professor with the U’s Distinguished Research Award in 1996.