Janet Jackel is head of the Optical Networking Systems Engineering Research group within Applied Research at Telcordia, in Red Bank, NJ. Dr. Jackel earned her BA in Physics from Brandeis University in 1969, and the Ph.D. degree, also in Physics, from Cornell University in 1976, with a thesis on “Nonlinear Optical Spectroscopy in the Excitonic Region of Cadmium Sulfate.” In 1976 she joined Bell Laboratories, in Holmdel, NJ, where her research was aimed at improving the processing of optical materials, primarily lithium niobate and glass waveguides; during this time she invented proton exchange in lithium niobate. After the breakup of AT&T in 1984, she moved to Bellcore (now Telcordia) where her research evolved with the needs of the rapidly evolving optical communications industry. During this time she moved from an emphasis on materials and devices to systems, networks, and applications of optical communications technology. For example, she took a lead role in the DARPA-supported MONET project, which designed, built, and carried out experiments on a then-novel WDM network connecting several US government agencies. For the past seven years she has managed a group that targets research in optical communications and technology, while continuing to carry out her own research, most recently in OCDMA, avionics and the use of optics for processing RF signals.
Dr. Jackel has published over 100 papers in technical journals and has presented much of this work in talks (including numerous invited talks) at professional conferences. She holds about fifteen patents for waveguide processing, optical device design, and communications architectures, with further patents pending. Dr. Jackel is a Fellow of the IEEE and of the Optical Society of America. She has received an IR&D 100 award and several Bellcore/Telcordia CEO Awards.
In the past Dr. Jackel has been an associate editor for Photonics Technologies Letters, and has served on program committees for the Optical Fiber Communications (OFC) Conference, for the Optical Society’s Integrated Photonics Research and Applications (IPRA) Conference as well as its predecessor, the Integrated and Guided Wave Optics (IGWO) Conference, and for years was on the program committee for NIST’s Symposium on Optical Fiber Measurements. Last fall she was editor for a feature issue of the Optical Society’s Journal of Optical Networking (JON) which targeted Optical CDMA. Currently she is an Associate Editor for the IEEE/LEOS Journal of Lightwave Technology.
As a new member of the BoG, Dr. Jackel would like to concentrate on the accessibility of online technical literature. To achieve this we will need to develop a model which makes economic sense: to make information available at costs that will be acceptable to those who need it while supporting the costs of publishing. This requires more than simply moving the existing journals to electronic publication; we should consider different ways to organize the journals and perhaps expansion of the topics covered, as the applications of optics expand.

TON (A.M.J.) KOONEN was born in Oss, The Netherlands, in 1954. He obtained his M.Sc. degree cum laude in Electrical Engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, in 1979. In the same year, he started his career in Philips Telecommunication Industry, in applied research on high-speed optical communication devices and systems. After the merger, he became a member of technical staff and in 1987 the technical manager of an applied research group on broadband fibre-optic systems at Bell Laboratories in Lucent Technologies. He and his team of up to 25 technical staff members worked on wavelength-multiplexing techniques for access and metro systems, analog and burst-mode optical amplifiers, CATV fibre-optic distribution networks, ATM-PON systems, VB5 broadband interfaces, and on high-speed transmission system electronics. Next to his industrial position, he has been a part-time professor in photonic networks at Twente University, The Netherlands, from 1991 to 2000. Since 2001, he is a full professor in the Electro-Optical Communication Systems group, a partner in the COBRA Institute, at Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. In 2004, he became the chairman of this group.
Ton’s main research interests are currently in broadband fibre access and in-building networks, and in optical packet-switched networks. He has initiated and led several European and national R&D projects in this area, a.o. on label-controlled optical packet routed networks (the EC project STOLAS), on dynamically reconfigurable fibre access networks (fibre-coax, fibre-wireless, FTTH; in the EC projects TOBASCO, PRISMA, and HARMONICS), and on short-range multimode (polymer) optical fibre networks for in-building applications. He has published more than 250 conference and journal papers, and holds 3 US patents plus some national/European ones. Presently, he is involved in a number of access/in-home projects in the European FP6 IST Broadband for All programme (MUSE, e-Photon/ONe+, POF-ALL), and in the Dutch programmes Freeband and IOP Generieke Communicatie. He also will be involved in a number of projects in the new European FP7 programme (ALPHA, BONE, …), starting early 2008. He has served numerous times as an auditor and project proposal reviewer for the European Commission R&D programmes. He also is a member of the programme committee of several Dutch research initiatives.
Ton Koonen is an IEEE Fellow since 2007. When with Lucent Technologies, in 1999 he was awarded the Bell Labs Fellow title (the first one in Europe). He is a Member of LEOS Committee on Optical Networks and Systems since 2006, and a Member of Board of IEEE LEOS Benelux Chapter since 2000. He has been a member of the Technical Programme Committee of several conferences, and is a Technical Programme Committee co-chair of ECOC 2008. He has been a short course presenter on Metro and Access Networks at ECOC from 2002 to 2006. He is a reviewer for JLT, PTL, JSTQE, JON, Electronics Letters, Optics Express, and an editor for OSN.
Ton is married and has three teenage sons.
On the LEOS Board of Governors, Ton Koonen hopes to contribute to involve more young people, as they are the future of our community, and so to stimulate the influx of students in our field. Furthermore he would like to extend the LEOS relations outside the US, notably with the large R&D programmes ongoing in Europe which are a fruitful interaction of many academia and industries. The cross-fertilization of LEOS’ field with other disciplines, such as wireless and computer technologies, can further increase LEOS’ prominence and stimulate young people into our field.

JERRY R. MEYER completed his Ph.D. in Physics at Brown University in 1977. The same year he took a position at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC, where he is now Head of the Quantum Optoelectronics Section. His research has centered on fundamental and applied studies of the optical and transport properties of semiconductors, as well as the design and development of novel optoelectronic devices. His recent research has sought to advance the performance of infrared lasers based on quantum heterostructures such as the type-II “W” laser, interband and quantum cascade lasers, large-area photonic-crystal distributed-feedback lasers, type-II antimonide photodiodes, and negative luminescence devices. He is co-inventor of the Quantitative Mobility Spectrum Analysis (QMSA), a comprehensive magneto-transport analysis technique which is marketed by Lake Shore Cryotronics. He has published more than 300 refereed journal articles, which have been cited over 5400 times, and has co-authored 20 patents and over 100 invited conference presentations. He is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America (2000), the American Physical Society (2001), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (2004), and the Institute of Physics (2005). He received the NRL Edison Patent Award (2005), the NRL Edison Chapter Sigma Xi Award for Pure Science (2003), the Department of the Navy Technology Transfer Royalty Award (2003), the Federal Laboratory Consortium Award for Excellence in Technology Transfer (2001), the NRL Distinguished Contribution Allowance Award (1999), 4 NRL Special Act Awards (2001-2007), and 5 NRL Research Publication Awards.
Dr. Meyer was Program Co-Chair of CLEO 2007, and will be General Co-Chair in 2009. He served on the LEOS Program Committee from 1993 to 2003, and was Chair of the Semiconductor Laser Subcommittee in 2000 and 2001. He Chaired the Journal of Applied Physics Editor Search Committee (2000), and Co-Chair the International Conference on Narrow Gap Semiconductors (2003), Mid-IR Optoelectronics: Materials & Devices (2002), and SPIE Photonics West Conference on In-Plane Semiconductor Lasers (2002). He has served on the Program Committee for numerous other meetings, and in a typical year referees 25-30 journal articles.

Peter Winzer was born in January 1973 in Vienna, Austria, he studied Electrical/ Communications Engineering at the Vienna University of Technology where he received a Ph.D. degree in 1998. His academic work was largely supported by the European Space Agency (ESA) and was related to space-borne Doppler laser measurement and communication systems. It was back then that he specialized in advanced digital optical modulation and high-sensitivity detection. In November 2000 he joined Bell Labs (Holmdel, NJ, USA) as a Member of Technical Staff and was promoted to a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff in 2007. Living in the United States since 2000, he and his wife Andrea have been raising their three kids Karoline (2000), Benedikt (2002), and Nikolaus (2005). When time allows, he enjoys skiing, skating, hiking, and playing the piano.
He very much likes, the fruitful, problem-rich environment he found at Bell Labs, with its enormous scientific breadth and depth. At Bell Labs, “implementing the impossible” has become his guiding principle, regardless of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. He first focused on Raman amplification, but eventually returned to his favorite fields: optical modulation advanced optical receiver concepts, and digital signal processing techniques. He also spent some time on higher-layer data network architectures for dynamic data services. Since 2005 he has been heavily involved in 100-Gb/s electronically multiplexed optical transmission demonstrations for next-generation Ethernet and Optical Transport Network applications.
He is actively involved in the scientific community as an author, reviewer, editor, and conference/workshop organizer, currently chairing the Optical Communications subcommittees of both LEOS and CLEO. As a Member of the Optical Society of America (OSA) and a Senior Member of the IEEE, he highly values these scientific communities as a valuable platform for high-quality scientific exchange. He is a strong advocate of “quality instead of quantity”, and his interest in serving on the LEOS BoG is fueled by the desire to foster the technical quality of LEOS in its journals, conferences, and meetings through establishing and maintaining effective quality control mechanisms and supporting means for rapid and wide dissemination of scientifically and professionally relevant material.