Leo Schowalter

Leo Schowalter was employed by the GE Global Research Center after receiving his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois in 1981. He was a professor in the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) physics department from 1987 and became department chair in 1997, the same year that he co-founded Crystal IS with another former GE colleague. Crystal IS commercialized single-crystal AlN substrates and UVC LEDs based on pseudomorphic AlGaN on these substrates for disinfection and instrumentation applications. Crystal IS was acquired by Asahi Kasei in 2011 and is now a wholly owned subsidiary.

Starting in 2017, Schowalter was appointed the Asahi Kasei Innovative Devices Industry-Academia Collaborative Chair at Nagoya University. This team announced the world’s first UVC laser diode in 2019 and, in early 2020, announced the best performance for far UVC LEDs in the 230nm to 240nm wavelength range. Schowalter is a visiting professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Cornell and has also joined the Florida-based startup company Visium (formally Lit Thinking), which is developing cost-effective far UVC for human-safe disinfection of shared spaces. Most recently, he has established the Visium Ultralabs in the Cornell Business and Technology Park to further push the AlGaN ultrawide bandgap semiconductors into the far-UVC.