Nick Holonyak Wife: Who is Katherine Holonyak?

Katherine Holonyak is the wife of Nick Holonyak Jr., an American engineer and educator best known for his 1962 invention of a light-emitting diode (LED).

Katherine and Nick were married for over sixty years until his death on Sept. 18, 2022 at age 93.

Details about Katherine are under wraps. However, her late husband 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.

He was a recipient of several awards including;

• The Charles Hard Townes Award of the Optical Society of America,
• The NAS Award for the Industrial Application of Science,
• The Frederic Ives Medal of the Optical Society of America,
• The IEEE Medal of Honor and many others.

In 2021, he was awarded the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering “for the creation and development of LED lighting, which forms the basis of all solid-state lighting technology.”