OSA Fellow Zhores Ivanovich Alferov attended the Ul’yanov Electrotechnical Institute in Leningrad (LETI) from which he graduated in 1952. He began work at the Physico-Technical Institute in 1953, and by March of that year had helped in the creation of the first Soviet p-n junction transistor. He became director of the Institute in 1987, and remained there until his death.

He earned a Candidate of Sciences in Technology degree in 1961 and a doctor of sciences in physics and mathematics in 1970 from the Ioffe Institute.

In 1973, he took over as chair of optoelectronics at the St Petersburg State Electrotechnical University (former LETI), and in 1988 he was appointed to Dean of the Faculty of Physics and Technology at the St Petersburg Technical University.

In 1989, he was elected president of the Leningrad Scientific Center of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR; and, in April 1990, Vice-President of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. He published four books, 400 articles, and 50 semiconductor inventions.

Throughout his career, he was awarded the Ballantyne Medal of the Franklin Institute, the Lenin Prize, the Hewlett Packard Europhysics Prize, the State Prize of the USSR, the GaAs Symposium Award, the H. Welker Medal, the Karpinskii Prize, the Ioffe PRaize, OSA’s Nick Holonyak, Jr. Award, the 2000 Nobel Prize for Physics, and the Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology. He was a member a many industry societies, organizations, and schools.