Steffen Koehler
Vice President for Product Management & Marketing, II-VI
![]()
About the Speaker
Steffen Koehler has worked in a variety of levels in the optical networking industry, from carriers to systems to modules. After earning a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in Electro-optics from the University of Southern California, writing a thesis on optoelectronic integrated circuits. He then became a visiting scientist at the Hughes Research Laboratories and a post-doctoral researcher at Princeton University.
Dr. Koehler joined the advanced technology subsidiary of SBC, where he performed technical and economic analyses on the first generation of DWDM and 10 Gb/s SONET systems. He then went to CIENA, where he was the principal systems engineer and product marketing director responsible for the company’s first ring-based DWDM system.
In the components and modules realm, Dr. Koehler was Vice President of Product Marketing at Kymata, a planar optical components company; Sparkolor, a tunable laser manufacturer; Ignis Optics, a pioneer in XFP transceiver modules; and Phasebridge a LiNbO3-based optical module provider. These startup companies were acquired by Alcatel, Intel, Emcore, and Bookham, respectively.
Dr. Koehler is now vice president for product management and marketing at the II-VI Transceiver Business Unit, which II-VI acquired from Finisar Corp. last year. Since joining Finisar ten years ago, he has been working in product line management for the company’s optical transceiver business, which enjoys the top market share in the industry worldwide.
