Alferness elected to OSA vice presidency

Rod C. Alferness, senior vice president of optical networking research at Lucent Technologies’ Bell Labs, was inducted in January as vice president of the Optical Society of America for 2006. Alferness will be president-elect in 2007 and president in 2008.

An elected member of the OSA board of directors from 2001 through 2003, Alferness has chaired several OSA program committees, including CLEO, photonics in switching, and fellows and honorary members. He was also on the board of editors and the Tyndall Award selection committee. Alferness was the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Lightwave Technology and an associate editor of Optics Letters and Photonics Technology Letters.

Alferness received his BS in physics in 1968 from Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, and later earned his masters degree and PhD in physics from the University of Michigan. Alferness is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and is a fellow of the IEEE Lasers and Electro-Optics Society (LEOS). He has served as an elected member of the LEOS administrative committee and on program committees for various conferences.

In a recent interview with OSA’s Optics & Photonics News, Alferness said OSA “needs to continue focusing on new members and the dissemination of information through good journals and good conferences.”

OSA should provide networking opportunities for its members, Alferness added. “It becomes the body of the industry, the community that people look to for direction, help in finding jobs, and help in developing new skills,” he said.

Also inducted in January, replacing three outgoing board members, were the society’s new directors at large. Kenneth G. H. Baldwin is deputy director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Quantum-Atom Optics at the Australian National University, Canberra, and senior fellow at the atomic and molecular physics laboratories at ANU’s Research School of Physical Sciences and Engineering. Philip Bucksbaum is the director of the Ultrafast Science Center at Stanford University, a professor at SLAC and in Stanford’s applied physics department, and the Peter Franken Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Michigan. Ian Walmsley is head of atomic and laser physics at the Ultrafast Group at the University of Oxford, UK.