Talking e ink co founder jd albert about printless plans
JD Albert (born April 18, 1975) is an American engineer, inventor, businessman and educator. Albert is one of the inventors of microencapsulated electrophoretic display (known as E Ink) commonly used in electronic devices such as e-readers.
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In 2016 Albert was one of the youngest inventors to ever be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Albert is named on over 70 granted US patents. He is currently the Director of Engineering at Bresslergroup, a product innovation lab and consultancy in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and a lecturer in mechanical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania's Integrated Product Design (IPD) program.
Career
Along with Barrett Comiskey, he developed the E Ink display. The two invented E Ink while they were undergraduates at MIT. MIT Media Lab professor Joseph Jacobson recruited them to create a technology that mimicked pages in a book. As Albert told Science Friday, "It was really true experimental discovery. ... We had ideas, we were doing a lot of research, reading a lot of patents — many of which were expired patents — recreating experiments, and really, truly forging ahead to make this thing work. It involved a lot of prototypes, and it involved a huge amount of failed experiments." In 1997, after years of research and experimentation, Comiskey and fellow MIT undergraduate JD Albert realized a working prototype.
In 1997, Albert, Comiskey and Jacobson along with Russ Wilcox and Jerome Rubin founded E Ink Corporation.
Albert became CEO of the solar roofing startup company SRS Energy.
Albert currently works as Director of Engineering at the product design and development firm, Bresslergroup.
Albert contributed a chapter on design thinking for early-stage startups to the book Design Thinking: New Product Development Essentials from the PDMA. He has also contributed articles about product development to Entrepreneur and Wired.
Personal Life and Education
Albert has a Bachelor's of Science in Mechanical Engineering from MIT. He lives in Philadelphia.