JD Albert (born April 18, 1975) is an American engineer, inventor, 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. [1]
In 2016 Albert became one of the youngest inventors ever inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. [2] Albert is named on over 100 US patents. [3] He teaches product development in the University of Pennsylvania's Integrated Product Design (IPD) program. [4]
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. [5] As Albert told Science Friday, [6] "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 a year 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. [7]
Albert contributed a chapter on design thinking for early-stage startups to the book Design Thinking: New Product Development Essentials from the PDMA. [8] He has also contributed articles about product development to Entrepreneur [9] and Wired. [10]
Albert has a Bachelor's of Science in Mechanical Engineering [11] from MIT. He lives in Philadelphia.