Amnon Yariv Ph.D

Amnon Yariv Ph.D General Information

Biography

Dr. Amnon Yariv is a Co-Founder and serves as Board Member at Telescent. He serves as Venture Partner & Investment Professional at Arcturus Capital. He is the Martin and Eileen Summerfield Professor of Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering at Caltech. He obtained a B.S. (1954), M.S. (1956), and Ph.D. (1958) in electrical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley. He went to the Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey in 1959, joining the early stages of the laser effort. He came to the California Institute of Technology in 1964. On the technical and scientific side, he took part (with various co-workers) in the discovery of a number of early solid-state laser systems, proposing and demonstrating the field of semiconductor integrated optics, the suggestion and demonstration of the semiconductor distributed feedback laser, and in co-pioneering the field of phase conjugate optics. His present research efforts are in the areas of nonlinear optics, semiconductor lasers, and integrated optics with an emphasis on communication and computation. The highlight of his group's work was the invention of the semiconductor-distributed feedback laser, a device widely used in the Internet's fiber-optic communications. He co-founded Ortel Corp. (formerly Nasdaq: ORTL), which was subsequently acquired by Lucent for ~$3B. He is an Israeli-American professor of applied physics and electrical engineering at Caltech, known for innovations in optoelectronics. In 2010, Yariv was selected as a winner of the National Medal of Science for "scientific and engineering contributions to photonics and quantum electronics that have profoundly impacted lightwave communications and the field of optics as a whole." He has also been selected to receive the IEEE Photonics Award for 2011. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. In 1985 he was awarded the Harold Pender Award by the University of Pennsylvania. In 1992 he was awarded the Harvey Prize by the Technion in Haifa, Israel, for "Pioneering contributions to optoelectronics, wave propagation in crystals and nonlinear and phase conjugate optics, and his demonstration of semiconductor-based integrated optics technology leading to the development of high-speed and stable solid-state lasers." He has authored several texts on optical electronics and photonics.