[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 148 (2002), Part 8]
[Senate]
[Page 10335]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




THE 2002 NATIONAL MEDAL OF TECHNOLOGY TO PROFESSOR JERRY M. WOODALL OF 
                            YALE UNIVERSITY

 Mr. LIEBERMAN. Madam President, I rise today to express my 
heartfelt congratulations to a Connecticut resident, Professor Jerry M. 
Woodall of Yale University, for being awarded the 2002 National Medal 
of Technology, our country's highest honor celebrating America's 
leading innovators. This represents the first time that a professor 
from Yale has ever achieved this extraordinary recognition, and it 
serves to underscore Yale's deep and renewed commitment to establishing 
itself as one of the world's premier engineering institutions.
  I cannot imagine another person for whom this prestigious award is 
more richly deserved. Professor Woodall, who holds the position of C. 
Baldwin Sawyer Professor of Electrical Engineering at Yale, has 
conducted pioneering research in compound semiconductor materials and 
devices over a career spanning four decades. Fully half of the entire 
world's annual sales of compound semiconductor components are made 
possible by his research legacy. He invented electronic and 
optoelectronic devices seen ubiquitously in modern life, including the 
red LEDs used in indicators and stoplights, the infrared LED used in CD 
players, TV remote controls and computer networks, the high speed 
transistors used in cell phones and satellites, and the weight-
efficient solar cell.
  Professor Woodall spent most of the early and mid parts of his career 
at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, where he rose to the 
coveted rank of IBM Fellow. He built the first high purity single 
crystals of gallium arsenide there, enabling the first definitive 
measurements of carrier velocity versus electric field relationships, 
as well as GaAs crystals used for the first non-supercooled injection 
laser. He and Hans Ruprecht pioneered the liquid-phase epitaxial growth 
of both Si doped GaAs used for high efficiency IR LEDs, and gallium 
aluminum arsenide (GaAlAs), which led to his most important research 
contribution so far the first working heterojunction. They built it 
from gallium aluminum arsenide mated to gallium arsenide (GaAlAs/GaAs), 
and it remains the world's most important compound semiconductor 
heterojunction.
  He then invented and patented many important commercial high-speed 
electronic and photonic devices which depend on the heterojunction, 
including bright red LEDs and the two classes of ultra-fast 
transistors, called the heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBT) and 
pseudomorphic high-electron-mobility transistor (pHEMT). Many new areas 
of solid-state physics have evolved and been realized as a result of 
his work, including the semiconductor superlattice, low-dimensional 
systems, mesoscopics, and resonant tunneling.
  Professor Woodall was elected to the National Academy of Engineering 
in 1989 and is a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), the 
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the 
Electrochemical Society (ECS), and AVS. He has served as president of 
the ECS and AVS, and on the board and executive committee of the 
American Institute of Physics (AIP). He has published 315 publications 
in the open literature and been issued 67 U.S. patents. He received 
five major IBM Research Division Awards, 30 IBM Invention Achievement 
Awards, and an IBM Corporate Award in 1992 for the invention of the 
GaAlAs/GaAs heterojunction. Other recognition includes a 1975 
Industrial Research 100 Award; the 1980 Electronics Division Award of 
the Electrochemical Society (ECS); the 1984 IEEE Jack A. Morton Award; 
the 1985 ECS Solid State Science and Technology Award; the 1988 
Heinrich Welker Gold Medal and International GaAs Symposium Award; the 
1990 American Vacuum Society's (AVS) Medard Welch Award, its highest 
honor; the 1997 Eta Kappa Nu Vladimir Karapetoff Eminent Members' 
Award; the 1998 American Society for Engineering Education's General 
Electric Senior Research Award; and the 1998 ECS Edward Goodrich 
Acheson Award, its highest honor.
  Woodall co-founded LightSpin Technologies, Inc., a high technology 
startup company, and serves as its Chief Science Officer. From 1993 
through 1999, he held the Charles William Harrison Distinguished 
Professorship of Microelectronics at Purdue University. He earned a 
Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Cornell University and a B.S. in 
metallurgy from MIT.
  I speak with utmost sincerity in expressing my gratitude to Professor 
Woodall for the lifetime of contributions or, more accurately, several 
lifetimes' worth of contributions that he has rendered in service to 
our nation in enabling it to become the world leader in technology and 
research. Our lives and our society would be dramatically different 
today had we not benefitted from Professor Woodall's drive and genius, 
and it fills me with exceptional pride to see him recognized for his 
efforts. Outstanding technologists such as he create to the tools to 
fully realize human and societal potential, and by having someone as 
accomplished as Professor Woodall on its faculty, both Connecticut and 
Yale University will be well-situated to produce the next generation of 
engineering lights. On behalf of your state and your country, Professor 
Woodall, please accept my deepest congratulations and thanks.

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