Kristian Elmholdt Stubkjaer

Kristian Elmholdt Stubkjaer is a newly elected member of the LEOS board of Governors. He is director for Research Center COM at the Technical University of Denmark, where he is also a professor.

After college Kristian started studies of Electrical Engineering at the Technical University of Denmark in 1972. During his study time Professor Palle Jeppesen and Professor Magnus Danielsen initiated the field of optical communication in Denmark. It was an easy decision to join this exciting and very dynamic field and Kristian ended up specializing in system properties of semiconductor lasers both in his Master thesis project that was completed in 1977 and in the Ph.D. study that he completed in 1981. Kristian’s Ph.D. study in Denmark was interrupted by an 18-month stay in Japan, where he joined the well-known group of Professor Suematsu at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Around 1979 the Tokyo group was one of the only ones in the world that could produce long wavelength InGaAsP semiconductor lasers. Being part of the Japanese research team was a unique opportunity and an experience that has brought lasting relations with many good colleagues in Japan.
After the Ph.D. degree Kristian was drafted for military service and spend time in the army studying underwater acoustics – so slightly longer wavelengths compared to optics. This was followed by a one-year employment at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in USA where he had another chance to carry out research at one of the top laboratories of the world.
In 1983 he became a faculty member at the Technical University of Denmark where his research concentrated on active components for optical systems and networks. Much effort was devoted to optical amplifiers and later on to more advanced semiconductor structures for wavelength conversion and simple signal processing. A field in which his team of young, brilliant Ph.D. students did many pioneering experiments.
He and his research team have also been active on many European research projects where collaboration with Europe’s leading companies and university groups has been extremely stimulating for the research environment offered to staff and students.
Over the years Kristian has been active on many conference committees including those for OFC, ECOC, IOOC, ECIO, Optical amplifiers and their Applications, IEEE LEOS summer topical meetings. This year he serves as the technical program chair for the European Conference on Optical Communication that is taking place in Copenhagen in September. He is also a Danish representative in the management committee of the European research program IST that is a 3.5 billon $ program covering Information Technologies in a broad sense.
Since 1998 he has devoted most of his time to management as director for Research Center COM that is the center for telecommunication at the Technical University of Denmark. With 135 staff members COM covers central aspects of telecommunications, including optical communication. Research includes component technologies, system and network technologies as well as applications and services.