[caption id="" align="alignright" width="274"] The father of LEDs and Nobel Laureate Dr. Shuji Nakamura speaks at Fab 8, GlobalFoundries' Distinguished Lecturers series Thursday April 14, 2016 in Malta, NY. (John Carl D'Annibale / Times Union)[/caption]

Shuji Nakamura, whose discovery on how to make brighter, more efficient lighting using blue light-emitting diodes earned him the 2014 Nobel Prize in physics, has moved on from his historic invention.

And that may be a great thing for upstate New York's high-tech economy.

Nakamura, a professor at the University of California Santa Barabara, spoke at an event at GlobalFoundries' Fab 8 computer chip factory in Malta about his life and enigmatic career, which intersected several years ago with Thomas Caulfield, the general manager at Fab 8.

Caulfield, who called Nakamura his "hero," said that Nakamura's invention helped to create today's bright white LED lighting fixtures.

"Without blue, they couldn't make white light," Caulfield said. "And it was only possible when Shuji proved it was possible. He changed the world."

After they were perfected by Nakamura in the 1990s, blue LEDs helped to usher in a wave of advances in electronics, lighting up TVs and smart phone screens and electronic devices.

And they ushered in cheap lighting for the masses that needed only a small battery to operate, especially in Third World countries — a major reason why Nakamura won the Nobel Prize along with two other Japanese researchers who also worked on blue LED advances.

But now Nakamura is working on violet LEDs, which he says are more efficient and better for people than blue LEDs, which have been suspected to cause sleep problems.

"This is the highest-efficiency LED," Nakamura said of violet LEDs, while acknowledging the issues with blue LEDs, which have been found to reduce the production of melatonin in the body and disrupt circadian rhythms.

"This has become a very, very serious problem," Nakamura said. "If you have small children, be careful. But only blue is the problem."

That issue could create huge advantages for Soraa, the California LED lighting company that Nakamura founded with two colleagues in 2008. Soraa makes violet LEDs that include the whole spectrum of colors and produce light much closer to natural sunlight, eliminating some of the issues with exposure to blue LEDs.

And Soraa's rise could greatly benefit upstate New York. The company announced in October plans for a $1.3 billion factory in suburban Syracuse that could employ more than 400 people.

Caulfield, the Fab 8 general manager, was president of Soraa for two years before he joined GlobalFoundries in 2014, and he believes that bringing LED manufacturing to upstate will to much to help create a sustainable high-tech economy, with Buffalo the site of the gigawatt Solar City factory and the Rochester area focusing on photonics — all overseen by SUNY Polytechnic Institute. "All of these high-tech manufacturing projects are just parts of that puzzle," Caulfield said.

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