JD Albert


JD Albert is an American engineer, inventor, and educator. Albert is one of the inventors of microencapsulated electrophoretic display commonly used in electronic devices such as e-readers.
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 80 granted US patents. He currently teaches product development in the University of Pennsylvania's Integrated Product Design 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... 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 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.
Albert is a member of Tau Beta Pi, the engineering honor society.

Personal life and education

Albert has a Bachelor's of Science in Mechanical Engineering from MIT. He lives in Philadelphia.