Nick Holonyak, Jr. (born November 3, 1928) is an American engineer and educator. He is noted particularly for his 1962 invention of a light-emitting diode (LED) that emitted visible red light instead of infrared light; Holonyak was then working at the General Electric Company's research laboratory in Syracuse, New York.He is a John Bardeen Endowed Chair Emeritus in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he has been since leaving General Electric in 1963.He won Charles Stark Draper Prize in 2015 for the invention, development, and commercialization of materials and processes for light-emitting diodes (LEDs).