Bell Labs' Physicist Rod Alferness Receives 2005 IEEE Photonics Award at Optical Fiber Conference (OFC)
Posted on: Tuesday, 8 March 2005, 15:00 CST
ANAHEIM, Calif., March 8 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs today announced that Rod C. Alferness, senior vice president, Optical Networking and Photonics Research, received the 2005 IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Photonics Award. The award, sponsored by IEEE Lasers and Electro-Optics Society, honors outstanding achievements in the field of photonics, and was presented at the Optical Fiber Conference (OFC) being held from March 6-11 in Anaheim, Calif.
Alferness was honored for "seminal contributions to enabling photonics technologies and for visionary leadership in their application to networks and systems." Photonic technologies generally include lasers, optical switches and other network elements that transmit signals in the form of light over optical fibers.
Throughout his career, Alferness has been a leader in optical switching and modulation technology and architecture, championing a vision of optical layer networking that supports higher capacity and lower complexity for communications networks. His ongoing leadership and sustained contributions to the opto-electronics field, including many novel optical transmission technologies, have been a key part of defining today's optical networks, as well as helping to define tomorrow's next generation of optical networks.
Since joining Bell Labs in 1976, after receiving a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Michigan, Alferness has held a variety of positions, including Chief Technology Officer and Advanced Technology and Architecture vice president, Optical Networking Group, and head of the Photonics Networks Research Group, Bell Labs.
Among his notable achievements, Alferness invented and demonstrated a family of integrated optics devices in lithium niobate, including some of the first tunable wavelength filters and optical switch/modulators that form the basis for many of today's wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) optical networking systems. In addition, his work has resulted in the demonstration of novel waveguide electro-optical devices and circuits, widely tunable lasers and photonic switching systems.
Alferness was a co-originator and Bell Labs' program director of the DARPA (U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) -- sponsored MONET program that demonstrated the feasibility of wavelength switched optical networks in the mid-1990s.
Alferness has authored more than 100 papers, holds more than 35 patents and has authored five book chapters. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, as well as a Fellow of the IEEE and the Optical Society of America (OSA). He is a past president of the IEEE Lasers and Electro-Optics Society (LEOS), and has served on the board of directors of OSA. He was Editor of the Journal of Lightwave Technology. He also serves on the European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC) Executive Management Committee.
About Bell Labs and Lucent Technologies
Bell Labs is the leading source of new communications technologies. It has generated more than 30,000 patents since 1925 and has played a pivotal role in inventing or perfecting key communications technologies, including transistors, digital networking and signal processing, lasers and fiber-optic communications systems, communications satellites, cellular telephony, electronic switching of calls, touch-tone dialing, and modems. Bell Labs scientists have received six Nobel Prizes in Physics, nine U.S. National Medals of Science and eight U.S. National Medals of Technology(R). For more information about Bell Labs, visit its Web site at http://www.bell-labs.com/.
Lucent Technologies designs and delivers the systems, services and software that drive next-generation communications networks. Backed by Bell Labs research and development, Lucent uses its strengths in mobility, optical, software, data and voice networking technologies, as well as services, to create new revenue-generating opportunities for its customers, while enabling them to quickly deploy and better manage their networks. Lucent's customer base includes communications service providers, governments and enterprises worldwide. For more information on Lucent Technologies, which has headquarters in Murray Hill, N.J., USA, visit http://www.lucent.com/.
Lucent Technologies
CONTACT: Jenn McManus, OFC Booth 2341, office, +1-908-582-5703,mcmanusj@lucent.com, or Dick Muldoon, office, +1-908-582-1616, mobile,+1-908-930-9391, rpmuldoon@lucent.com, both of Lucent Technologies
Web site: http://www.lucent.com/http://www.bell-labs.com/
Source: PRNewswire-FirstCall
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