Nebraska professor Mathias Schubert honored as National Academy of Inventors Fellow

LINCOLN, Neb — Mathias Schubert, a leading figure in optical ellipsometry, has been named a 2025 National Academy of Inventors Fellow, the highest accolade from the organization. Schubert, a J.A. Woollam Distinguished Professor of Engineering at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, joins 13 other faculty members from the university who have received this honor. The recognition is awarded to researchers whose work has been transformed into inventions and technologies with societal impact.

Schubert has dedicated 20 years at Nebraska to tackling significant challenges, from ellipsometry to international collaborations. His university faculty webpage lists nine patents and 11 papers, but Schubert believes there may be hundreds more. “To tell you the truth, I have no idea how many patents or papers there are with my name on them. I’m not focusing on that,” Schubert said. “Other people say I should write a patent or a paper for so many things. I tell them I’d rather try this or I want to try that because new things keep popping up on my radar and pursuing those things is what makes my work so exciting.”

His research focuses on using ellipsometry to explore ways to enhance the electrical capabilities of materials, leading to advancements in semiconductors, optics, and displays. Schubert’s work has resulted in multiple inventions, including the optical Hall effect in semiconductors and ellipsometric instrumentation development.

Currently, Schubert is part of an international team working to identify new semiconductor materials for high-power applications. The team is particularly interested in gallium oxide, a material with wide-bandgap semiconductor properties suitable for high-voltage switches and power devices. Due to the scarcity of high-quality gallium oxide crystals in nature, the team employs a process akin to farm-to-table methods to create semiconductor wafers.

James Speck at the University of California, Santa Barbara, initiates the process by “growing” crystals from raw materials. These are then transformed into ultrathin film wafers by Debdeep Jena from Cornell University and Zbigniew Galazka from the Leibniz Institute for Crystal Growth in Germany. Schubert’s team in Nebraska evaluates the wafers’ quality and performance before they are made available to consumers.

Schubert expressed excitement about the ongoing project and the potential discoveries ahead. “I actually, honestly, have the opinion that if what I do is of interest, the problems will find me,” Schubert said. “There’s this concept of doing things at different frequencies, different mathematical approaches, that’s what you see all over the place. So many brilliant minds out there, and everyone’s going to have ideas. That’s exciting, to work with those people together, just listening to them and learning.”

The 2025 class of fellows includes 169 researchers from across the U.S., collectively holding over 5,300 U.S. patents and including Nobel Prize recipients.