Robert (Bob) M. Jopson was born in Altadena, California, USA, in 1950. He lived in many parts of California before receiving the B.S. degree in physics from the University of California, Davis in 1972. He received the Ph.D. degree in physics from the Harvard University in 1981. He joined AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1981 and has continued with Bell Laboratories under various corporate owners until the present day.

Jopson’s student and post-doctoral research was in atomic physics on the spectroscopy of trapped negative ions, generation of short-wavelength light and the spectroscopy of double Rydberg atoms.  Since 1983, he has worked on problems in lightwave communications including semiconductor optical amplifiers, erbium-doped fiber amplifiers, optically preamplified receivers, phase conjugation for dispersion compensation and for nonlinearity mitigation, various photonic integrated circuits, high-capacity lightwave systems, polarization-mode dispersion, fiber parametric gain and parametric sampling.

Jopson was the recipient of the 2018 Stephen D. Fantone Distinguished Service Award from OSA, where he has been a Fellow since 2005.