What is your current position/area of expertise/research study?
I am Senior Director of System Architecture at Adtran and I lead research and design activities in optical systems, which include investigations of new WDM technologies, components, and system architectures for their future implementation in Adtran’s product line. Within my team we develop optical system specifications and engineering rules for all network deployments of Adtran’s optical transport system.
I am also Adjunct Professor at Georgia Tech where I collaborate with professors and advise graduate students on optical telecom research projects.
My current research interests include high capacity WDM transmission, ROADM networks, transmission impairments, and optical performance monitoring.
What inspired you to accept the position of Deputy Editor of the Journal of Lightwave Technology (JLT)?
As someone working in optical telecom, JLT has always represented the journal with the highest standards for publication, combining a high degree of novelty, detailed description of the research work and uncompromising quality in presentation. When I was invited to join the JLT editorial board as an Associate Editor, I saw an opportunity to use my experience of 30 years in photonics research and industry and contribute to maintaining the high quality of this journal at a time when the number of submissions was rapidly increasing, and new fields of research were coming into focus for JLT. This required more reviewers and an expansion in the editorial board. In the past four years as Associate Editor, I learned a lot about the review process and the challenges which come with the AE role: finding good reviewers for every manuscript and judging their sometimes-contradictory assessments.
As Deputy Editor, I can now share my experience in managing the review process with new Associate Editors joining the editorial board helping them come up to speed more quickly to make the best decisions for the manuscripts under review and to expedite the review process without compromising quality and fairness.
It is also a pleasure and a privilege to continue working on the editorial board with some of the best researchers in our field, researchers who dedicate considerable time to our shared goal of maintaining the high quality of the publications in JLT. My tasks are made easier by the Deputy and Associate Editors with whom I work and by the constant support from the Editor-in-Chief, Prof. Magnus Karlsson. When in need of advice, I am sure we will still benefit from the extensive experience of our previous Editor-in-Chief Gabriella Bosco.
What specific assets do you bring to the table as an editorial board member?
In my career, I conducted fundamental research at the university and research institute where I studied and, for many years, I have been working in product-focused research and system design. The research I have been doing at Adtran and with Georgia Tech is determined by the need to find new product solutions to address practical limitations currently facing our industry and to enable key features of fiber optic systems such as increased transmission capacity, wavelength routing flexibility, performance prediction, and performance monitoring.
New ideas cannot be implemented in a product unless they offer clear advantages over alternative solutions, unless they are feasible to implement and can operate under the variety of conditions imposed by field deployment. To the editorial board of JLT I bring the mindset and views of someone who is confronted in his daily work with challenges of practical implementations. I have therefore been able to balance the reviews of many papers by selecting reviewers from industry along with reviewers from universities and research institutes. Bringing into the review process engineers with experience in research and currently working on product design has led to improvements of published papers through the questions they raise and the feedback they provide to authors. They may point to ideas already investigated, solutions already implemented in commercial products, or they may challenge the authors to validate their ideas under relevant operating conditions, with practical limitations and constraints.
How do you hope to contribute to the relevance of JLT in the rapidly advancing field of photonics?
JLT will continue to be highly relevant if we continue to focus on the most relevant topics for our readers, require a substantial degree of novelty, and high-quality standards of our publications. This requires highly competent reviewers on all topics covered by JLT, reviewers who are also willing to dedicate some of their time to our common effort to provide our research community with high quality papers. To this end, I have been active in attracting new reviewers from among recent Ph.D. graduates and industry experts, an effort I will continue to pursue as Deputy Editor.
One specific initiative I would like to point out is the special session at OFC 2025 entitled “The journal review process; all you need to know,” which I have been co-organizing along with the Editors-in-Chief of Photonics Technology Letters and Journal of Optical Communication and Networking for the past 3 years at OFC. This event offers participants an opportunity to learn about the review process from members of the editorial boards and invited speakers. Editors can also receive feedback from authors to improve the review process, and to adapt it to the recent changes in technology, most notably discussing the impact of Artificial Intelligence on writing and publication of research papers.
Why Photonics? What Was Your “Photonics Moment?”
I grew up when lasers were a new and amazing technology and there were frequent reports in the news of new applications touching almost all aspects of our lives. I still remember a lasers exhibition at a science museum which was very impressive and that might have been my “photonics moment”. I thought lasers represented the future, and at least for me, it did.
Once I entered the Physics Department at the University of Bucharest, I gravitated towards Optics for research projects leading to my graduation thesis. I enjoyed learning about all applications of optics and photonics, but the most fascinating field of optics was holography and its applications. I had the chance to record my own holograms (which were terrible quality by the way, but I enjoyed them nonetheless).
Understanding the mysteries of interference and diffraction coupled with the visual appeal of 3-dimensional images proved irresistible. I ended up doing my Ph.D. in diffractive optics and teaching an Optics lab at the University of Texas at Arlington, where each week one group of students would record their own hologram.
Would you like to add anything else?
During my Ph.D. studies with Prof. Magnusson, I managed the Optics Lab he had developed at U.T. Arlington. We had a variety of lasers in the lab which we were using in our research in diffractive optics, they spanned the visual spectrum, and some emitted in the infrared or ultraviolet. Occasionally we had to take a break to give visitors a presentation of our lab, usually high-school students visiting the university. I would turn on all lasers, of various colors, some pulsed, others continuous, add some diffraction gratings with dazzling array of diffraction orders, and turn our research lab turned into a light show while presenting lasers and fundamental optical phenomena.
It was fun and rewarding to see the students’ amazement, and I hope that at least for one of those young visitors the lab visit was a “photonics moment”, or at least an “engineering moment”.
