LEDs have many advantages. They are mechanically rugged, easy to dim, compact, and long lasting. Many complex optical components can be miniaturized if based on LEDs. Although the interactions among the electrical, thermal and optical characteristics of LEDs  are challenging, Coushaine calls what he does product design. This refers not so much to the aesthetic aspects of LEDs as to the combination of their components and assembly. Coushaine studied mechanical engineering at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. After completing his degree in 1984, he worked for a few years as an engineer at an automation technology company before joining Sylvania in 1988. Sylvania was a lamp manufacturer that was acquired by Osram in 1993 and renamed Osram SylvaniaOSRAM SYLVANIA. Like Osram, the company is a wholly-owned Siemens subsidiary. At first Coushaine was also responsible for automation technology at Sylvania, but when his employer began looking for engineers in 1992 for an automobile headlight project, he volunteered to work on the project. “That was a very important turning point in my career,” says Coushaine. “I went from developing automation systems for the production of lamps to developing the lamps themselves.”

After the acquisition by Osram in 1993, Coushaine began to work intensively on Automotive LED products. His first major success was the development of Joule, the world’s first standardized LED system for the automobile industry. “The team and I were responsible for the development and design of the body of the LED module,” explains Coushaine. How are the individual elements arranged? Where are the leads? Which materials are optimal? These and many other questions played a role during development.

LED technology has been continuously refined since Joule was introduced on the market in 2005. For example, these tiny light sources have become increasingly powerful in the course of time, and the Joule products have also had to be continuously revised. Coushaine and the Joule development team were always up to date. “The greater luminosity of the light-emitting diodes, for example, enabled us to gradually reduce the number of LEDs in a module,” says Coushaine. This has made the modules more efficient, cheaper and more compact. Second-generation Joule systems for taillights have since gone into mass production and can be found in a number of models from the Ford Mustang, to Audi, BMW, and Volkswagen.

After automobile taillights became a standard application for LEDs, Coushaine went looking for new challenges and in 2006 transferred to Osram-Sylvania’sOSRAM SYLVANIA’s New Ventures Group, which develops new potential applications for LEDs. “Here it has always been about finding new uses for LEDs. To put it simply, creativity knows no bounds in this area,” Coushaine enthuses. “I only do crazy things now – and they work!” he says. Whether it’s a dining room table mat with LED lighting, folding LED pocket flashlights, or the now common “Dot-it” LED – the self-adhesive round lamps you turn on and off with a quick press of the surface – all of these ideas came from Coushaine. In the U.S., a lamp that he designed specifically for use in the shower is also a big success. Many old houses do not have electrical lights in the shower areas. Coushaine therefore developed an LED lamp that produces its own electricity from a tiny generator powered simply by the flow of water to the shower head. “My team and I worked on that for two years,” he recalls. The problem was to develop a generator that could produce enough electricity for the LED from just a small amount of water. “After all, enough water has to be left over to shower,” he points out. The development quickly become a top seller. Today, thousands of showers are illuminated thanks to the Eco-Shower Light.

Coushaine, who has three children, considers inventing to be a creative act on which every development engineer should be allowed to spend some work time. So far he has 159 inventions, 184 granted individual patents, and 59 IPR families to his name.

Now that his two older children are out of the house, Coushaine once again has more time for his numerous hobbies. It comes as no surprise that one of them involves decorating his house in Rindge, New Hampshire, with chains of LEDs that change color in keeping with the seasons - Orange for Halloween, Red and Green for Christmas. “My neighbors love it!” he says. Coushaine goes camping almost every weekend with his wife, where the two practice a hobby that is finding more and more devotees the world over: geocaching, a sort of GPS-guided scavenger hunt for adults, in which all kinds of objects are hidden and the coordinates of the hiding places are published on the Internet.