Thayer School of Engineering office of entrepreneurship and technology transfer vice provost Eric Fossum is an award-winning engineer who invented the pixel image sensor, patented in 1995, that made it possible for cell phones to have built-in cameras. Fossum’s career as an entrepreneur, inventor, professor and researcher has evolved as he has built increasingly sophisticated sensor chips for biomedical and industrial cameras. He also currently serves as the director of Dartmouth’s engineering Ph.D. innovation program, which prepares engineering students to translate their technical innovation into entrepreneurship.
Fossum’s accolades include a 2021Technology and Engineering Emmy award, the 2025 National Medal of Technology and Innovation and the 2026 Charles Stark Draper Prize for Engineering. Fossum is set to receive the fourth annual American Innovator Award in Washington, D.C. on June 3.
The Dartmouth interviewed Fossum about his 1995 patent, the future of engineering and what it takes for innovative ideas to succeed in practice.
You invented the complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor active pixel image sensor — or “camera-on-a-chip” — which is used in almost all cell phone cameras today and powers over seven billion cameras made annually. How did you get this idea, and what was the process of making it happen?
EF: I was working for NASA’s jet propulsion laboratory in California, and my job was to figure out how to make cameras on the interplanetary spacecraft smaller and more reliable by shrinking all the electronics onto one chip. The existing technologies were incompatible, but I took the best of each of them and made something that would work with the CMOS recipe. It took us about six months to make the first chip, get it back and test it. Amazingly, it worked the very first time. That doesn’t usually happen.
We continued improving the chip over the next couple of years, and then we tried to get the U.S. industry to adopt this new technology for cameras, but nobody was particularly interested, so we decided to start a company ourselves, Photobit Corporation.
Is it through Photobit that the chips ended up being used in most cell phones?
EF: Yes, in a predecessor sort of way. We demonstrated that the technology worked and used it in webcams, pill cameras, dental x-ray cameras and other things. Then, in the late 1990s, the idea of a camera in a cell phone became popular, and ours was the right technology for that application, so we pursued that, but within a year or two, we actually wound up selling the company to Micron Technology, a multinational semiconductor company.
What are you currently working on?
EF: I’m working on image sensor chips for even more advanced and flexible cameras, one chip that can be used for all different kinds of cameras. This is mostly for biomedical and industrial cameras, not cell phones.
What factors determine whether a startup will succeed?
EF: One is whether the idea is compelling. Another is whether it needs other ideas to also be invented at the same time by other people. Also, you have to be in the market at the right time, because if it’s a bad economic year, then you might not be able to find people with money to invest, even though it’s a great idea. Another thing you need in a startup is luck, which is hard to control. It either happens or it doesn’t.
What is one piece of advice you always give your students?
EF: Aim for excellence in whatever they do, and do something that they enjoy doing. Not just do it for the money, but do it because this is what they want to do in life. There’s nothing like having a job that you wake up to every morning and go, “I can’t wait to get to work and start working on this.”
How can higher education encourage innovation?
EF: The opportunity for hands-on experiential learning early in your academic life. If it’s all classroom learning, you don’t get the opportunity to explore different avenues in life. Thayer has been quite successful in getting students into hands-on learning experiences right away. That might be one of the reasons why we have gender parity, unlike many other engineering schools.
What are some current problems or strengths with how engineering is taught?
EF: Sometimes the perception is that you have to learn all these mathematical or physics tools before you can do any engineering at all, but I think that’s a fallacy. Learning by doing is much more satisfying than a lot of book-learning. The book-learning style is traditional in many other countries, and at other universities in the United States, but it’s changing. People are recognizing that experiential learning is critical to making well-rounded engineers.
How do you think artificial intelligence has changed the field of engineering? What kinds of things can AI be useful for or not?
EF: It’s too early to say; it has not really changed it a lot yet. The book-learning part might be able to be replaced by AI, but it’ll be hard for AI to do the experiential hands-on learning part. Ultimately, I still think there is the need for the human mind in the quest for solving problems. But there are certain types of problems, such as coding or mathematical problems, that AI seems to be able to solve pretty quickly and perhaps more accurately. Hopefully having all that knowledge at one’s fingertips will allow us to do better things for humanity.
Do you think the idea of invention will change with AI? Can AI now invent things?
EF: Invention is a solution to a problem. I think AI will be able to invent things, or at least seem to invent things. Whether AI can get a patent or not is a different question. That’s not really legal these days; there has to be a person behind it. I don’t really know what the limits are going to be for what AI can do, but I’d like to think that AI may not have as many “eureka” moments as humans. Otherwise, life is going to get pretty boring.
How can we cultivate human creativity in the face of AI?
EF: Experiential learning as early as possible, even in elementary school. When I was growing up, we didn’t have a lot of structured time — we just hung out with our friends and made up activities. That cultivated a lot of creativity. Perhaps some of that creativity is not being cultivated as much these days, with structured environments. It would be useful to give students a little more unstructured, creative community time, even at the college-age.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Kay Alvito ’29 is a news reporter from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil studying comparative literature and creative writing. On campus, she is very involved with the arts as a member of the Rude Mechanicals classical theatre company and the dance group Street Soul.
