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Alumni Profiles
Tiejun (TJ) Xia graduated from CREOL 1994 with his Ph.D. As of 2008 he was a distinguished Member of Technical Staff (DMTS), Verizon Communication in Dallas, TX. In 2007, he led a team that accomplished the fastest field test ever for live streaming video, in which live video traffic was carried over more than 500km by 100-Gb/s transmission in field for the first time in the world. Because of this accomplishment he received the “2008 Telecom Leaders Circle” award in Verizon Telecom. When asked for about what advice he would give to an incoming graduate student, he said “In addition to obtain good grades do not forget to train yourself to be more innovative.”
He told us that the training he received at CREOL built a solid foundation to his current job for technology research and development in optical communication. His job function touches almost every corner of optical communications, from ultra-long haul and long haul, regional and metro, to fiber to the home optical networks. “No matter which area I am working the training in CREOL always plays its role,” Xia said. He went on, “Professors sincerely help the students and CREOL is like a family.”
Chien-Hui (Vicky) Wen, graduated from the College of Optics and Photonics in 2006 with a Ph.D. As of 2008, she was a Senior Optical Engineer, with Motorola Inc, in Chicago, IL. Her advice to incoming graduate students was “Do your best to learn when you are at school. CREOL has the best professors that you can learn a lot.” She went on to say, “What I had learned at school is very practical for my current job. I have to use the knowledge I learned everyday.” She told us that in addition to studying, it was important to stay involved and that CREOL has Spring and Fall events every year and she had a good time with friends she met as a graduate student. Wen is the recipient of the Newport Excellent Research Award.
Roman Malendevich graduated from CREOL in 2001 with a Ph.D. As of 2008, he is with Infinera Corp. and lives in Silicon Valley, CA. When asked about what advice he would give to incoming graduate students, he said “Learn lots of programming: Matlab, Visual Studio, NET, databases, SQL, statistical data processing, JMP and get EE.” He told us that CREOL was influential in preparing him for a broad range of skills for his current job including applications in waveguided optics. One surprising skill was the development of his knowledge about purchasing expensive lasers and equipment that lead to his ability to negotiate with sales representatives from various companies. In addition, he was complimentary of Dr. Stegeman because he was able to attend conferences which helped in his ability to build communication skills and confidence.
His most memorable experiences ranged from getting involved in the picosecond Nd-YAG laser and OPG-OPA system work to his Ph.D. defense and even summer school in Poland.
Malendevich was involved in starting up Luxtera, Inc., which was featured in Forbes magazine, and a second company, Infinera, Corp., in which he was involved in its startup had its initial public opening in June 2008.
Bojan Resan (center) graduated with his Ph.D. in 2004. In the fall of 2008 he was a Senior Development Engineer and Project Manager at Coherent Inc, in Santa Clara, CA. He currently lives in Mountain View, CA.
When asked what advice he would give to incoming graduate students, he said “Pick a field of work (lab) that you are the most passionate for. Nothing else matters so much and can change next year.” He told us that the preparation he received at CREOL was a perfect preparation for his current job. It was excellent match and a very strong, wide background in optics, which enabled him to progress in my career very rapidly. Although CREOL was known within Coherent, his experiences and success within the company resulted in stronger interest of the company to hire others from his former lab and CREOL in general.
When asked which of his experiences were most memorable, Resan said, “There were many and it is not fair to isolate one. Certainly, CREOL picnics and Spring Flings were very nice events that brought stronger friendships within students as well as between students and faculty. Thanks a lot to Prof. Van Stryland and M.J. for continuous efforts in organizing this.”
Resan has received numerous awards and recognitions including: Reviewer for IEEE/LEOS Photonics Technology Letters scientific journal; IEEE/LEOS Graduate Student Fellowship Award 2004; SPIE Educational Scholarship 2004; finalist in the CREOL Student of the Year 2004 competition; stipend from the French Government for graduate studies in France; stipends from the Central Europe Exchange Program for Students in 1996 for scientific visits to Technical University of Graz, Austria and University of Sophia, Bulgaria; travel grants including the US Corporate for Ultrafast Phenomena 2004 Conference, IEEE/LEOS for 2003 LEOS Annual meeting, University of Central Florida, and NATO for General Conference of the European Physical Society 1996.
Resan concluded that everyone should please keep the CREOL alumni database updated and encouraged former students to join as it is a very useful resource in future career. Finally, he said that the photo of him was a nice memory for him because it was taken just as they were graduating from UCF. He said that those in the photo are now “all over the world, laser and optics companies and universities....”
Michael M. Mielke graduated with a Ph.D., in 2003 and in 2008 was the Vice President of Engineering, Raydiance, Inc. He now lives in Bennett Valley, Sonoma County, California. When asked what advice he would give to incoming graduate students to CREOL, he said, “Try out different roles and explore every opportunity that interests you. This is the time to dare to be great, even if you don't know what you're doing. And work hard. Don't let anything pass you by.
He told us that the preparation he received at CREOL was outstanding. “The education is optical science and engineering is second to none,” Mielke said. “I can't emphasize this enough. I am really, really grateful for the breadth and depth of material I learned. I also learned incredibly valuable lessons from my advisor, Peter J. Delfyett, Jr. Pursuit of technology is fun and rewarding. But the ability to communicate complex ideas to a broad audience can move mountains.”
His most memorable experience at CREOL occurred when Prof. Delfyett asked him to fill in for him as a guest lecturer on optics and lasers to a class of more than 100 undergraduates in the honors program at UCF. He said it was both intimidating and quite exciting. He said about the experience, “I made it through in good shape, and I learned a good deal about myself and about sharing the fun we all enjoy in this field.”
As a student, Mielke garnered a few of the well-known awards, including the LEOS Fellowship and the OSA New Focus Grand Prize. Since leaving CREOL, he has focused on building Raydiance. His elevation to Vice President is a wonderful recognition of his role and contribution to its success.
Finally, Mielke told us that he “entered his time at CREOL not really knowing where I wanted to go or how successful I could ultimately be. I found support and opportunity at CREOL that helped me find my path.”
Joel McCajah Hales graduated with his Ph.D. in 2004. In 2008 he was a Senior Research Scientist in Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Georgia Institute of Technology. He currently lives in Atlanta, GA. His advice for incoming graduate students was to never be afraid to ask questions, it will help you develop a critical mind in your field early on.
When asked about the benefits of attending CREOL, he said, “working in a non-optics field allows me to utilize the entire broad knowledge base of optics and photonics that I received at CREOL. Also, the mentor/mentee relationships that I developed during my research work there has really helped me in my current role.”
His most memorable experience was meeting his wife, Katherine, and a number of lifelong friends. Hales said him and his classmates initiated a friendly competition to pursue different types of awards. He receive awards from SPIE and OSA/New Focus, competed for the UCF Pegasus award and received the UCF best dissertation award.
Finally, Hales said “I enjoyed my research work immensely but I also worked hard to make sure that it didn’t dominate my life. Mixing in travel, sports, and time with friends and family seemed to make work easier to handle.”
Jin U. Kang graduated in 1996 with a Ph.D. from CREOL. He is currently a Professor and Chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The Johns Hopkins University. He lives in Ellicott City, Maryland.
The asked what advice he would give to incoming graduate students, he said “Be self-reliant and learn what’s going on in your research area.” He went on to say that CREOL allowed him to be technically confident through very good courses and interacting with great researchers and faculty.
One of his most memorable experiences were M.J. Soileau’s picnics, which are a long CREOL/College of Optics and Photonics traditions.
Richard DeSalvo graduated with a Ph.D. degree in Physics in 1993 with a thesis entitled, “On Nonlinear Refraction and Two-Photon Absorption in Optical Media.” His paper on second order cascading was one of the top 25 cited papers in the Optics Letters and has redefined the field of cascaded second–order nonlinear optics, which led to spatial optical solitons and many other new phenomena.
DeSalvo currently is a Principal Investigator at Harris Corporation and Manager of Technology Studies and R&D Projects for Harris Corporation’s Government Communications Systems Division. His responsibilities include coordinating Division research and development activities supporting multi-divisional and multi-disciplinary technical initiatives for DARPA and other Government research laboratories.
During his first few years at Harris, DeSalvo was a Staff Engineer in the Electro-Optics Department and worked in coherent analog fiber optic system development using 1300 nm frequency stabilized Nd:YAG lasers. During this time, he co-developed a simple, but novel technique to generate double sideband suppressed carrier modulation formats for analog signals as a means of increasing the SNR of sensitive fiber optic links. DeSalvo is one of the founding associates for Harris Corporation’s mentor/protégé program working with engineers in the Center for Excellence for Optics and Photonics.
In his spare time, Richard is an avid surfer and skateboarder and shares these sports with his 10-year-old daughter Drew. Richard married his girlfriend, Tina, whom he met when he started at CREOL.
Popescu with Professor Ali Javan's first gas (HeNe) laser (MIT, June 2008) Gabriel Popescu graduated from CREOL in 2002 with his Ph.D. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering & Bioengineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He currently lives in Champaign, IL.
When asked about the advice he would give to incoming graduate students, Popescu stated, “Take advantage of the rich optics resources in CREOL, through classes and direct contact with various faculty members. Keep in mind that CREOL offers more optics courses than perhaps MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, and UIUC combined.”
He went on to say that the preparation he received at CREOL helped him later in his career. “I see my graduate studies at CREOL as the most important step in my training. The solid optics foundation allowed me to do well in research later. I am trying to incorporate as much as possible in the course that I am teaching now ECE460- Optical Imaging, and the new course I proposed for spring term called ECE598- Topics in Light Microscopy.” Both of these courses are ones offered at the University of Illinois.
Popescu had many memorable experiences that he thinks back on. From his first meeting with Jim Moharam upon his arrival, where he said “my understanding of spoken English was at a level of about 10%”, to the launch of shuttle Atlantis from the Cape in September of that first semester, his experiences are wide. He said that the experiences with the professors both in and out of the classroom were part of the rich experience of CREOL. Popescu said his many memories include “the ‘propagation matrix’ presentation during the first semester in Jannick Roland’s class (based on a vocabulary of about two dozen words), plotting the black body radiation curve by hand in the first homework from Glen Boreman (who appeared astonished and prompted a friend to buy me a copy of MathCAD), energetic “check-it-out” lectures by Peter Delfyett from whom I learned greatly, “roll-up your sleeves” classes by George Stegeman, not knowing the word “soot” in Eric van Stryland’s final exam, not clicking that Kramers-Kronig connects also the phase and the log of amplitude in Dave Hagan’s exam, encyclopedic seminars by Boris Zeldovich, and, of course, weekly soccer games, which I continued at MIT and now UIUC, and a solid group of true friends with whom I am still in touch today.” Finally, one memory he recalls is the “gator on a stick” treat at one of MJ Soileau’s picnics.
Among the awards he received, it includes a special recognition in CREOL when a colleague pulled him out of the lab, pushed him into the conference room where he was voted the first president of CAOS, the student group still in operation today. He was also CREOL student of the year. While on his post-doc at MIT his work on developing new optical microscopes for studying nanoscale cell structure and dynamics has been featured in various media (e.g. MIT TechTalk, Technology Review, R&D, Biophotonics International, OSA highlights, APS News, etc) Popescu reported one other successful collaboration. In 2005 he married Catherine, a biochemistry post-doc from Harvard, with whom he collaborated on red blood cell dynamics. He not only has written a few papers with Catherine, but also have a daughter, Sophia-Maria, and a son, Sorin Mihai as a result!
