Prestigious honors like the Jun-ichi Nishizawa Medal from the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers are typically presented to researchers at the end of their careers, as a way to recognize a lifetime of groundbreaking work. The Nishizawa Medal is no exception. It is one of just 16 medals that the 400,000-member professional organization presents each year. The Nishizawa Medal singles out an individual who has made outstanding contributions to material and device science. This year's recipient, Joe Campbell, the Lucien Carr III Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, certainly meets this criterion. While no single person can take credit for the broadband communications networks that circle the globe, these networks would be far more constrained and much less powerful without the avalanche photodiodes that he and his colleagues developed, beginning at Bell Laboratories in the 1980s and continuing at the University of Texas and the University of Virginia. As Roger Howe, an eminent electrical engineering professor at Stanford and member of the award committee, noted, “Without Joe's creative contributions to developing high-speed, low-noise photodiodes, we simply wouldn't have the broadband connectivity we enjoy today.†Avalanche photodiodes also have paved the way for advances in medical imaging and high-energy physics.