Constellations of Bright Ideas

It wasn’t money. It wasn’t prestige, nor the perfect weather. What lured one of Japan’s top scientists to the University of California campus here was a chance to work with the very best in his once-lonely quest to replace the lightbulb with a better idea.

Shuji Nakamura could have had his pick of universities on either side of the Pacific Rim. Indeed, the man whose inventions are likely to replace Thomas Edison’s incandescent lightbulb sometime this decade sparked a bidding war involving UCLA, Princeton, MIT, Berkeley and half a dozen other places.

But UC Santa Barbara won him by offering something no other place had: a cluster of scientists and engineers working with the same compounds that promise to become the next generation of semiconductor materials.

“My research is based on gallium nitride,” said Nakamura from his office, a pebble’s throw from the Pacific. “I checked all of the American universities. In the research of gallium nitride, this university is No. 1.”

In catching the Japanese star, the Santa Barbara campus made use of a growing practice in the high-stakes game of faculty hiring: creating a critical mass of similar-minded scholars or researchers who want nothing more than to engage in exciting work with their peers.

Harvard did it with its Afro-American studies program, pulling together a team of celebrity scholars including Henry Louis Gates Jr., Cornel West, William Julius Wilson, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham and Lawrence D. Bobo.

The University of Wisconsin is doing it with a “strategic cluster hire” of professors--including New York University genetics professor David Schwartz--for its budding Genome Center in Madison.

UCLA hopes to do it, if its proposed Nanosystems Institute wins a spirited competition for a $100-million state grant.

“It’s very hard to hire one person in isolation, even if you give them a lot of resources to build up an area,” said Caltech President David Baltimore, a veteran recruiter of academic talent. “They say, ‘I’m going to be lonely for too long.’ You try to bring together a package of people that will be exciting for everybody.”

Big Universities Have an Edge

That strategy worked for Wheaton College this year in meeting a challenge faced by many academic institutions: hiring more minority professors. The small liberal arts college in Massachusetts hired 10 new professors for this fall, five of them African American. Before the cluster hire, the college had only one black professor on a track for tenure.

To be sure, the new Wheaton professors will be scattered in different departments.

Smaller colleges and universities rarely have the luxury of hiring a cluster of professors in a particular academic niche, a strategy far more viable for larger universities or places launching new academic enterprises.

And some deans expect to see more of it at the University of California as it prepares to hire 7,000 new professors over the next decade--4,000 of them to replace retirees, 3,000 to meet the demands of growing student enrollment.

The strategy is likely to be employed by the UC campuses once the state awards grants to open three California Institutes for Science and Innovation. Gov. Gray Davis last week announced that a panel of prominent scientists would winnow a list of six proposals to three. Each winner will receive $100 million over the next four years.

The campuses have formed various alliances, proposing thematic institutes that would explore multidisciplinary approaches to biotechnology, agricultural genomics and information technology.

UCLA, for instance, has teamed up with UC Santa Barbara on its Nanosystems Institute proposal. Nano means one billionth, so the overarching theme is to get faculty to think small about everything from molecular medicine to semiconductor materials.

If the Nanosystems Institute gets the nod, “I imagine we will do quite a bit of cluster hiring,” said Roberto Peccei, UCLA’s dean of physical sciences. “It’s very exciting to embark on an adventure with people you think are your intellectual equals.”

That’s precisely what brought Shuji Nakamura to UC Santa Barbara. On any given day, Nakamura can be seen comparing test results with other professors in the materials department or expectantly awaiting the results of work with new crystalline compounds grown in the lab.

To understand UC Santa Barbara’s coup in landing Nakamura, one needs to understand how Nakamura’s breakthroughs may replace the incandescent lightbulb--Edison’s venerable invention, which dates to 1878--with an electronic device that is smaller, lasts much longer and could save U.S. households $35 billion a year in electric bills.

The device is a light-emitting diode, or LED. It converts electricity to light much more efficiently than an incandescent bulb, which wastes much of the energy as heat. Imagine solid-state lighting that uses one-fifth the energy, cannot be broken like a fragile lightbulb and doesn’t need to be replaced for 50 years.

Decades ago, scientists invented the red LED, commonly seen as the small red light on stereo receivers and other appliances. Then came orange and yellowish green. But no one could figure out how to make a true green or a blue, the two other primary colors needed to complete the spectrum that makes up white light.

String of Inventions Startles Scientists

Nakamura startled some corners of the scientific community when he burst on the scene with a bright blue LED in 1993. Two years later, he came up with a deep, rich green. Then he devised the first white LED, which he fashioned into a flashlight bulb that burns for 35 hours on batteries that would last for only six hours with conventional bulbs.

What followed was a string of other inventions, including the blue laser, which promises to make information on compact discs and digital video discs much more compact. The shorter wavelength of blue--compared with red or infrared--permits scientists to store information in much smaller spaces.

“Now, you can put one movie on a DVD,” Nakamura said. “With blue laser, you could put 10 movies on one.”

He holds dozens of patents on two continents. Hundreds of others are pending.

So it caught the attention of many universities when Nakamura, who is something of a Japanese national hero, signaled that he wanted to leave his post as research director at Nichia Chemical Industries.

UC Santa Barbara engineering professors Steven P. Denbaars and Umesh Mishra were quickly put on a plane bound for Japan. Of the nine professors and three dozen grad students and researchers working on gallium nitride semiconductors at Santa Barbara, these two had grown closest to Nakamura. They knew him well from scientific conferences in Japan, the United States and Europe. The three often found themselves chatting late into the night about topics of mutual fascination.

Nakamura, enthusiastic in all his pursuits, gushes about his new colleagues. “Steve and Umesh are some of my best friends, so it was easy for me to come here.”