Masataka Nakazawa

Biography

Dr. Masataka Nakazawa has been at the forefront of optical communications throughout much of his career. His best-known innovation resulted from his pumping scheme for erbium-doped fibers using 1.48 µm InGaAsP laser diodes. It led to the construction of the pioneering, compact EDFA, spawning thousands of optical transmission experiments and facilitating Internet protocol over wavelength-division multiplexed technology. A Fellow of the IEEE, Optical Society of America, Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers of Japan (IEICE) and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, he holds 100 patents and has published more than 300 papers.

His numerous awards include the IEE Electronics Letters Premium Award, two Outstanding Achievement Awards of the IEICE and an Outstanding Research Award from Japan’s Ministry of Science and Technology Agency. Dr. Nakazawa is a professor at the Research Institute of Electrical Communication of Tohoku University in Miyagi-Ken, Japan.