Dartmouth prof wins Emmy in tech and engineering category for role in smartphone camera invention
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Nov. 5—When he was working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory decades ago in Pasadena, Calif., Eric Fossum was just a few miles from the center of the entertainment business, but worlds away.
Fossum was part of a team designing machines to explore Jupiter and Saturn, and eventually the Mars rovers. A camera technology Fossum invented while working for NASA has become ubiquitous — the backbone of nearly all smartphone cameras — and become so much a part of the way television is made that on Thursday he was presented with an Emmy Award in technology and engineering by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Now a Dartmouth College professor, Fossum said the heavy golden statuette is a representation of the way art and science can converge, and of the many turns his life as an engineer has taken — from working for NASA to leading a start-up and eventually to teaching.
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Fossum explained, is where NASA engineers work on robots for space exploration.
"And on those spacecraft are cameras," Fossum said Thursday. Back in the 1990s, those cameras were huge and heavy. Fossum said he was tasked with making something smaller and lighter, which would in turn make spacecraft smaller, lighter and cheaper.
He came up with the complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) image sensor, the "camera on a chip." It was much smaller and lighter than the refrigerator-sized cameras that had been mounted on earlier spacecraft, and less susceptible to radiation damage.
"After the invention of CMOS, the camera on a chip, we realized it was good for planet Earth too," Fossum said.
After trying to sell the technology to other companies, Fossum and his wife started their own firm, Photobit, to develop the camera technology further, and find ways to sell it. Fossum sold the company, retired early, and moved to New Hampshire.
"After about three years I finished my bucket list, and had to do something else to give back," Fossum said.
He decided to teach, taking a position as a professor of emerging technologies at Dartmouth College, working with engineering students as they develop their own world-changing technologies.
But as the camera technology was catching on, and finding a place in almost every smartphone in the world, Fossum's work was already giving back, in a way.
The way smartphone cameras have shaped entertainment — from silly cat videos, videoconference meetings and performances during the pandemic — helped lead to the Emmy award, a recognition he shares with Eastman Kodak and ON Semiconductor.
But Fossum said he's even more proud of the way smartphone cameras have facilitated social justice movements, including the footage captured of the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.
"Social justice was not an application that ever crossed my mind," Fossum said. "And yet social justice is one of the things I'm most proud to contribute to."
