Electronics that can go on almost anything
On the Columbia campus in upper Manhattan, Ioannis Kymissis runs a lab with a deliberate name: CLUE, the Columbia Laboratory for Unconventional Electronics. The word choice is the thesis. His group works on electronics that break away from the usual silicon-on-a-wafer model - materials thin enough to be deposited onto glass, plastic, and flexible surfaces, and reliable enough to end up in products people actually use.
Kymissis is the Kenneth Brayer Professor of Electrical Engineering at Columbia and the chair of its Electrical Engineering department. He also serves as vice dean of Infrastructure and Innovation at Columbia Engineering. That is already three jobs. He holds a fourth: co-founder and acting CEO of Lumiode, a New York semiconductor startup working on high-brightness micro-LED microdisplays for augmented reality, wearables, automotive, and industrial uses.
The connective tissue between the professor and the CEO is the same problem that has occupied him for two decades: integration. It is one thing to make a bright light-emitting device in a research setting. It is another to marry millions of tiny emitters to the driving circuitry - the backplane - in a way that is bright, cheap, and manufacturable at scale. That unglamorous engineering is exactly where micro-LED displays tend to fail, and it is where Lumiode has focused its wafer-level approach.
His research spans the major families of modern display technology. Over the years his lab has worked on backplanes and integration strategies for OLED, QDLED, and micro-LED displays, and on the broader toolkit of thin-film materials - organic semiconductors, thin-film piezoelectrics, and recrystallized silicon devices. The through-line is not a single material but a stance: figure out how to build capable electronics on surfaces that were never meant to carry them.
From MIT to a company-making lab
Kymissis earned all three of his degrees - bachelor's, master's, and doctorate - from MIT. Along the way he completed his master's thesis at IBM Research through a cooperative program, an early sign of the industry-and-academia posture he would keep for the rest of his career. He held a postdoctoral appointment at MIT and did a stint as a consulting engineer at QD Vision, a quantum-dot display company, before joining Columbia's Electrical Engineering faculty in 2006.
Since then, the lab has functioned less like a traditional research group and more like a launchpad. Kymissis is a serial entrepreneur who has spun four companies out of his lab, among them Chromation, Radiator Labs, and Lumiode. Each took a piece of the group's research and pushed it toward a market. That is a rare batting average for an academic, and it is the kind of record that gets noticed.
It got noticed formally in 2024, when Kymissis was elected to the National Academy of Inventors 2024 Class of Fellows, recognized for contributions to thin-film electronics for displays and sensors. He was inducted at the academy's 14th Annual Meeting in Atlanta in June 2025. The NAI fellowship sits alongside a stack of others: he is a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of Optica (elected 2023), and a Fellow of the Society for Information Display. Earlier honors include a Vodafone Americas Foundation Wireless Innovation Award and the MIT Clean Energy Prize.
Four companies, one origin
Kymissis has repeatedly done the hard part of academic research - not just publishing it, but commercializing it.
Lumiode
Micro-LED microdisplays. Wafer-level manufacturing aimed at ultra-bright, low-cost displays for AR, wearables, and automotive. Kymissis is co-founder and acting CEO.
Chromation
Spun out of the lab's work on optics and spectral technology.
Radiator Labs
A building-energy venture applying the lab's engineering to heating efficiency.
+ a fourth spinout
Part of a track record of turning research into standalone companies.
Building the makers
Makerspace @ Columbia
Kymissis helped launch the campus fabrication space, giving students a place to build real, physical prototypes - not just simulate them.
Department chair
He leads Columbia's Electrical Engineering department while continuing to teach solid-state devices and display technology.
Public explainer
He speaks widely on "electronics on anything" - how thin-film systems can instrument the world around us.