Nick Holonyak Cause of Death

Nick Holonyak Jr., an American engineer and educator best known for his 1962 invention of a light-emitting diode (LED) has died. He was 93 years old.

What was Nick Holonyak’s cause of death? According to several sources, Holonyak died of malignancy in his prostate (prostate cancer).

Born on November 3, 1928, Holonyak earned his bachelor’s (1950), master’s (1951), and doctoral (1954) degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

In the year he earned his doctorate degree, Holonyak went to Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he worked on silicon-based electronic devices.

From 1955–1957 he served with the U.S. Army Signal Corps and from 1957–1963, he was a scientist at the General Electric Company’s Advanced Semiconductor Laboratory in Syracuse, New York, where he demonstrated the LED on October 9, 1962.

The LED emitted visible red light instead of infrared light and after leaving General Electric in 1963, he returned to his alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he later became John Bardeen Endowed Chair Emeritus in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physics.