BA-SID Professional Person Spotlight

Joel Pollack

Member on the Board of Directors at CLEARInk Displays, Inc.

Joel has been involved in display development for more than 50 years, dating back to when LCDs did not operate at room temperature. He has worked on many new technologies and has worn many hats – physicist, engineering manager, sales, marketing manager, and CEO.

Joel retired from Amazon’s Lab126 in 2016 where he was a Sr. Engineering Manager for Display Hardware Engineering, responsible for the display development used in Amazon’s digital products such as e-readers, echo and tablets. Currently he is a private industry consultant and had been the Independent Board Director for CLEARink Displays and has advised them on color filter design.

He was the CEO of Clairvoyante from 2004 until the company’s acquisition by Samsung March 2008. Clairvoyante’s PenTile technology has been used in hundreds of products including nearly every Samsung Galaxy OLED phone as well as in Apple’s XS. He also worked at Nvidia as a director of display technology. Previously, he served for 13 years as Vice President of the Sharp’s Display BU with responsibility for crafting their display marketing strategy for the Americas. Joel was also a physicist at Xerox Webster Research Center, LCD engineering manager at Tektronix and a marketing and sales executive at Tektronix where he managed the development of their molded probe product line.

He served for 5 years as the Director of the Bay Area Chapter of the SID. Mr. Pollack holds a B.S. in Physics from Rochester Institute of Technology and a Masters in Materials Science from the University of Rochester. He has authored many publications and patents on LCD and ink jet technology and has been a past winner of an SID Best Paper Award.