Robert Blum, Director of Strategic Marketing, Oclaro, USA

Robert Blum is Director of Strategic Marketing at Oclaro, a corporate role that covers Oclaro’s entire product portfolio. He was previously Director of Product Management and Marketing for Oclaro’s Integrated Photonics Business, where he was responsible for the 40G and 100G DWDM portfolio as well other line side and consumer laser products. Before joining Oclaro in 2010, he was Product Line Manager for optical transmission components at JDS Uniphase Corporation from 2006-2010 and held various engineering and marketing management roles at Gemfire Corporation from 2001-2006, all in California. Robert worked at Deutsche Telekom’s research labs in Darmstadt, Germany, from 1994-1996 while completing his master’s thesis and holds a doctorate degree in Physics from TUHH in Hamburg. He has also studied and done research at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne, Switzerland, and at Stanford University, California.


Peter De Dobbelaere, VP Engineering, Luxtera, Inc., USA

Peter De Dobbelaere received the Ph.D. degree in integrated optics from the University of Gent, Belgium in 1995. From 1995 to 1999, he was with Akzo-Nobel N.V., The Netherlands and U.S., where he was engaged in product development and reliability of polymer-based thermo-optic waveguide devices. In 1999, he joined OMM Inc., San Diego, CA, where he was responsible for product and technology development of MEMS-based optical switches. In 2004, he joined Luxtera, Inc., Carlsbad, CA, where he is currently responsible for engineering and technology development for silicon photonics products.


Chris Doerr, Director of Integrated Photonics, Acacia Communications, USA

Christopher R. Doerr earned a B.S. in aeronautical engineering and a B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was an Air Force pilot 1990-1991. Since joining Bell Labs in 1995, Doerr’s research has focused on integrated devices for optical communication. He received the OSA Engineering Excellence Award in 2002. He is a Fellow of IEEE and OSA. He was Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Photonics Technology Letters from 2006-2008. He was an Associate Editor for the Journal of Lightwave Technology from 2008-2011. He was awarded the IEEE William Streifer Scientific Achievement Award in 2009. He became a Bell Labs Fellow in 2011. He joined Acacia Communications in 2011.


Tom Issenhuth, Optical Network Architect, Microsoft Azure Networking, USA

Tom Issenhuth is responsible for the architecture and roadmap of the Microsoft’s optical networks both inside and outside the data centers.  He joined Microsoft in this position in November 2011.

Prior to joining Microsoft, Tom was the Principal Network Architect for the Level 3 Communications optical network since the company’s inception in 1997 until November 2011.  In 2012 Level 3 operated the largest Internet Service Provider network in the world which services over 2,700 major corporations in 450 markets with over 100,000 route miles of fiber.  Tom’s optical responsibilities included metro, intercity and trans-oceanic networks in North America, Europe and Asia.  With the initial Level 3 optical network Tom lead the effort that drove the optical industry to focus on cost in their network designs resulting in greater reach and lower costs.  With the start of web scale growth in the Level 3 network Tom led the effort that worked with optical equipment vendors to develop the required capabilities, scale and industry leading pricing which allowed Level 3 to support the largest Internet backbone and wave business in the world. 
 
Prior to joining Level 3 in 1997, Tom spent 9 years at Metropolitan Fiber Systems (MFS) where he designed and deployed numerous metro fiber networks in North America and Europe.  At MFS Tom led the effort to transition away from asynchronous optical equipment to SONET equipment which resulted in the first major SONET deployment in the US.  Tom was based in Europe for three years where he led the effort to expand the MFS optical networks to Europe and was instrumental in designing one of the first non-consortium trans-Atlantic cable systems.   


Thomas Koch, Dean, College of Optical Sciences, University of Arizona, USA

Thomas L. Koch is Dean of the College of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona.  Previously he held Vice President positions in research and development at SDL, Lucent, and Agere Systems.  Prof. Koch’s research helped to advance semiconductor lasers for optical communications and physics-based modeling of system-level performance.  He was also an early pioneer in photonic integration technology at Bell Labs, including some of the earliest demonstrations of the powerful potential of this technology in tunable lasers, and WDM and coherent communications, and more recently he has contributed to the rapidly evolving field of silicon photonics.  Prof. Koch is a Fellow of Bell Labs, the OSA, and the IEEE, and his contributions have been recognized with the IEEE Sumner Award, the IEEE LEOS William Streifer Award, and election into the US National Academy of Engineering.


Vladimir G. Kozlov, Founder and CEO of LightCounting Market Research

Vladimir Kozlov is the founder and CEO of LightCounting, an optical communications market research company established in 2004 with an objective of providing in-depth coverage of market and technologies for high speed optoelectronic interfaces employed in communications.

Dr. Kozlov has more than 20 years of experience in lasers, detectors, optoelectronics, optical communications and market research. Dr. Kozlov held market analyst, product development and research staff positions at RHK Inc., Lucent Technologies and Princeton University.

Serving as Senior Market Analyst at RHK, Dr. Kozlov initiated coverage of several segments of the optical component and module market, including optical transceivers. He completed numerous projects on technology and market analysis for leading optical suppliers.

Dr. Kozlov was involved in development of 10Gbps and tunable laser products at Lucent Technologies, thin film organic semiconductor optoelectronics at Princeton University and blue-green semiconductor lasers at Brown University. Dr. Kozlov also conducted research on ultrafast lasers and spectroscopy of semiconductors.

During his career, Dr. Kozlov contributed to establishing of several start-up companies in the area of optoelectronics, including Microtech Instrument Inc., Fianium Ltd and LX Medical Inc. All these businesses are commercializing optical technologies for industrial and medical applications.

Dr. Kozlov holds several US patents and has numerous publications in the area of optoelectronics. He received M. Sc. at Moscow State University in Russia and Ph. D in Physics at Brown University in the United States.


Vikrant Lal, Director, Adv. Product Development, Infinera, USA

Vikrant Lal received his BSEE from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India, MSEE from the University of Maryland, College Park, and Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of California at Santa Barbara, in 1999, 2001, and 2006, respectively. At UCSB he demonstrated monolithically integrated tunable laser and SOA-MZI devices, which were among the most complex photonic integrated circuits at the time. He is currently the Director of Advanced Development in the Optical Integrated Circuit Group at Infinera. He has authored/co-authored over 50 publications in journals and conferences, and has been the co-author on 3 US patents.


Martin Schell, Executive Director, Fraunhofer HHI, Germany

Martin Schell is a professor in the department of Solid State Physics of the Technical University of Berlin, chair for Optic and Optoelectronic Integration, and is jointly heading the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute, Berlin, Germany.

He received the Dipl.-Phys. degree from the Rheinisch-Westfaelische Technische Hochschule Aachen, Germany, in 1989, and the Dr. rer. nat. degree from the Technical University Berlin, in 1993. He joined the Heinrich Hertz Institute in 2005 as head of the Photonic Component department. In 2010, he became deputy head of HHI. Since 2014, he co-heads HHI together with Thomas Wiegand.

From 2002 to 2005, he was head of production and procurement at Infineon Fiber Optics, Berlin, Germany, leading ~1000 employees in three nations and four sites. Prior to that, he was segment leader Optical Components, responsible for marketing, strategy, and product development for a product segment with $ 12 million sales and ~20 employees.


Marc Taubenblatt, Senior Manager, Optical Communications and High Speed Test, IBM, USA

Dr. Marc Taubenblatt is currently Senior Manager, Optical Communications and High Speed Test, at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center, focusing on optical interconnects and high speed electrical packaging for computer systems and data centers, test and innovative diagnostic techniques for high performance computer chips and thermal solutions for HPC and Data Center systems.  Dr. Taubenblatt has had responsibility for coordinating the IBM Research WW optical interconnect strategy for the past 15 years. In addition, he currently manages a government sponsored research program on advanced computing technology.  Dr. Taubenblatt has served on the IBM Research technical strategy staff, where he co-led the Global Technology Outlook, an IBM Research Division wide effort in forecasting future technology trends.  Before that, he managed the IBM Research Microelectronics Manufacturing Research Program, a cross-Research R&D program in collaboration with IBM’s microelectronics division, focusing on projects directly influencing semiconductor fabrication cost and efficiencies.  He received a BS degree in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University and MS and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.  Dr. Taubenblatt has given numerous invited talks on optical interconnects for supercomputing and datacenters including Optical Fiber Conference 2011, IEEE Photonics 2011, IEEE Summer Topicals 2012,  International Symposium on Compound Semiconductors 2012, Optical Fiber Conference (panelist) 2013, and Green Photonics Symposium 2014, Optical Fiber Conference (panelist) 2015.  Dr. Taubenblatt has been at IBM Research for over 29 years and is also a member of the IBM Academy of Technology and a Principal Research Staff Member.


Tino Treiber, Outreach Executive, AIM Photonics, USA

Tino Treiber has more than 35 years of experience in semiconductor technology manufacturing and is used to manage in complex business environments while building partnerships with key industry decision makers. He has deep knowledge and vast manufacturing experience in paving roads for new business and product ideas, from technology / product development to manufacturing and successful market introduction.
 
Tino held various management positions, amongst others with IBM Semiconductors, SubMicron Semiconductor Technologies and SIX Semiconductors. He founded and managed Infinite Technologies, a technology solutions and consulting company and Curetis, a company providing advanced molecular diagnostic solutions.

Lately, as Sr. Fellow of Manufacturing at SUNYPoly Sematech, Tino lead technology initiatives in the fields of cutting edge semiconductors, photonics and biomedical, and where he now has joined the AIM Photonics team as Outreach Executive.
 

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