Rodney C. Alferness

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Biography

Dr. Rod C. Alferness' seminal and sustained work on optical switching technology and architecture has driven the vision of fiber optics communication to reality and has been central to the now well accepted concept of optical layer networking. In his role as senior vice president of Optical Networking Research at Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey, he has introduced many new optical transmission technologies now deployed in conventional and next-generation reconfigurable telecommunications networks. Dr. Alferness is world renowned for his pioneering research and early demonstrations of novel lithium niobate and indium-phosphide waveguide electro-optic and opto-electronic devices, now used in thousands of land, sea and cables light wave systems around the world. These form the foundation for most of the wavelength-division multiplexed systems today.

An IEEE Fellow, he has served as president of the IEEE Lasers and Electro-Optics Society from 1996 to 1997 and as editor of the IEEE Journal of Lightwave Technology.