Larry A. Coldren is the Fred Kavli Professor of Optoelectronics and Sensors at the University of California, Santa Barbara, CA. He received his PhD in EE from Stanford Univ. and spent 13 years in research at Bell Labs before joining UCSB in 1984, where he holds appointments in the ECE and Materials Departments. He acted as Dean of Engineering at UCSB from 2009-2011. He is the co-founder of two startup companies that have been successfully acquired. Coldren has authored or co-authored over a thousand journal and conference papers, 8 book chapters and two textbooks. He has been issued 61 patents and is a recipient of several awards, including the John Tyndall, Aron Kressel, David Sarnoff, IPRM, and Nick Holonyak Awards. He is a Life Fellow of the IEEE, and a Fellow of OSA and IEE as well as a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

At Bell Labs Coldren worked on Surface-Acoustic-Wave (SAW) filters and tunable coupled-cavity lasers using novel RIE technology that he was first to develop for the then new InP-based materials. At UCSB he continued work on multiple-section lasers, in 1988 inventing the widely-tunable multi-element mirror concept, now used in numerous commercial products. In the 1990s, his group made seminal contributions to efficient VCSEL designs, now used in high-speed data links. His group continued efforts on high-performance InP-based photonic integrated circuits (PICs) and high-speed VCSELs over the past couple of decades. In recent years, coherent receiver PICs, with integrated widely-tunable LO lasers, have been combined with high-speed electronics to create optical phase-locked loop systems for coherent analog receivers and optical frequency synthesis.