Peter Winzer

Peter J. Winzer received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the Technical University of Vienna, Austria, in 1998. Supported by the European Space Agency, he investigated space-borne Doppler lidar and laser communications. From 2000 through 2019 he worked at Bell Labs in NJ, where he focused on fiber-optic communication systems and networks, contributed to many high-speed optical networking products, and set a variety of transmission records up to 1 Tbit/s per carrier, including the first field trial of live 100G video traffic. Following his involvement in estimating the optical fiber Shannon capacity, he pioneered space-division multiplexing (SDM) and multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) techniques to scale optical transport systems. Before leaving Bell Labs, he led its global fiber-optic transmission systems research. In 2020, he founded the high-tech start-up Nubis Communications. He has published over 500 scientific papers and holds over 100 patents. Dr. Winzer is actively involved with the IEEE Photonics Society and Optica (OSA). He served as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE/OSA Journal of Lightwave Technology from 2013 to 2018, was Program Chair of the 2009 European Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC), and Program/General Chair of the 2015/2017 Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC). Dr. Winzer is a Highly Cited Researcher, Bell Labs Fellow, Fellow of the IEEE, the OSA, and the US National Academy of Inventors, and elected member of the US National Academy of Engineering. He received multiple awards, including the John Tyndall Award, and holds an honorary doctorate from the Technical University of Eindhoven.