Dubroff: 25 years later, Nobel awards rock the Central Coast region
The Business Times was barely six months old in the fall of 2000 when two UC Santa Barbara professors were awarded Nobel prizes in consecutive weeks.
The awards were to Herb Kroemer, in physics, for his work on advanced semiconductors and to Alan Heeger in chemistry for his work on what would become OLED screens used in cell phones and TVs. They took the community and the Business Times by surprise.
And although I had covered mergers, meltdowns, breakthroughs and IPOs, nothing prepared me for the news tsunami that accompanies a Nobel prize announcement.
The October 7 announcement that professors John Martinis and Michel Devoret, honored for their work in Quantum mechanics, had won the seventh and eighth Nobels awarded to UCSB professors brought back memories of that first year.
The announcements are made at 2 a.m. and if you are lucky, you will be awake by 6 a.m. to catch the first fragmentary reports. In 2025, social media is how we write about it first and the long day typically includes a scramble to learn more, get names and titles right and then a press conference followed by a wave of emails and conversations.
This year’s awards were quite special because they came a few months after UCSB’s longest-serving chancellor, Henry Yang, retired. It was Yang who recruited the faculty that produced many of the Nobel laureates, and as I wrote him via email, the 2025 awards are a testament to his vision of UCSB as a world leader in science.
In his reply, Yang gave credit to the entire campus and added kudos to a pair of crucial supporters. He wrote that credit is due to “Bruce and Susan Worster, who is also a dedicated Trustee, for their vision and generosity in endowing the Worster Chair in Experimental Physics in honor of John Martinis.”
Over the years, Yang, a member of the Business Times Hall of Fame, reminded me several times that the Central Coast is a magnet for innovation, and its attraction grows stronger each year.
It’s a great win for Chancellor Dennis Assanis, who arrived on campus just recently and now gets introduced to the power of UCSB research in real time. And to College of Engineering Dean Umesh Mishra, who stuck around after he sold his company, Transphorm, and is in his second year as dean.
A pair of Nobel wins like those in 2025 will generate a force field of their own for recruiting talent in areas like Quantum computing and AI, where Microsoft and Google already have labs and growing outposts.
When the Nobel prizes in Medicine were announced earlier in the week, my memories of 2000 kicked in and I mentioned to Co-Managing Editor Jorge Mercado that there might possibly be a winner out of UCSB. Our short list was off the mark, but we were ready to be surprised.
The Nobel prizes for UCSB since 2000 trace the arc of advances that are finding their way into our lives every day. New forms of semiconductors are at the heart of the modern sensor technology – in drones, self-driving cars, medical devices and space defense.
OLEDs are everywhere and someday Next’s generation windows using the same technology may generate enough electricity to cool, heat and light the buildings in which they are installed.
Developments in physics are telling us more about the composition of the universe, and in economics, we have a better understanding of how the timing of government policies will affect their effectiveness – for better and worse.
The last Nobel prize awarded to a UCSB professor went to Shuji Nakamura for research into semiconductors that enable full-spectrum LED lighting.
That was in 2014. Amid today’s campus upheavals, political fights over research funding and an assault on vaccine science, it’s easy to lose perspective.
But these advances are real, they are impacting our lives and they are making the Central Coast a magnet for innovation. We’ll continue to cover the story as a new generation of entrepreneurs takes home honors and a new generation of journalists wakes up early to report the news.
Henry Dubroff is the founder, owner and editor of the Pacific Coast Business Times. He can be reached at [email protected].
