Virtual International Research/Education Center: Energy Saving LEDs

This paper presents an establish and operation of energy saving LEDs virtual international research/education center. This is a long-term international engineering education and research collaboration program among California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly), United States, Peking University (PKU), Beijing, China, and Tsinghua University, Beijing, China on light emitting diode (LED) research in the past seven years. We focused on GaN laser diode (LD) research for the first year with PKU. Then GaN light emitting diode (LED) research was added during the second year. In 2012, we expanded our interest to organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) and collaborated with Tsinghua University. The project began by having faculty from Cal Poly to work in PKU for one summer. The collaboration in the rest of the period was done through teleconference and e-mails. Cal Poly graduate students were grouped with graduate students in China and worked closely on certain projects. Through this project, our students (US and Chinese) obtained experience in collaborating with foreign partners, especially awareness of cultural differences, without traveling abroad in most of the time.