The Optametra Team

Robert A. Marsland, Jr., Ph.D., President received his Ph.D. degree from Stanford University in 1990. He was one of the four founders of New Focus, Inc. that summer and later became Vice President of Focused Research, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of New Focus. New Focus was listed on the NASDAQ in May 2000 and sold to Bookham in 2004. While at New Focus, Rob managed the photodetector product line which included the fastest available photodetector technology. He also managed the electrical engineering development efforts that supported the Picomotor and tunable laser product lines. After the IPO, Rob managed the development and qualification of several telecom components including 10-Gb/s receivers and modulator drivers. While at FRI, Rob initiated sponsored research in excess of $3 M and managed a team of 30 engineers and production personnel; he has also been a lecturer at UW Madison, and further serves as a founder and president of St Ambrose Academy.

Daniel van der Weide, Ph.D., Vice-President of Engineering, received his Ph.D. degree from Stanford University in 1993, and has founded several companies, including vdW Design, Tera-X and NeuWave Medical (formerly Micrablate). While Dan has been Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering at UW Madison since 1999, he has produced over 12 Ph.D. students, over 70 journal publications and raised and participated in over $15 M of research support. His research focuses on high-speed electronics and optics, and extends to applications in medicine and measurement of nanometer-scale materials.

Advisory Board

Prof. Alan Willner, Ph.D., University of Southern California, received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University. He was a Postdoctoral Member of the Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories (Crawford Hill) and a Member of Technical Staff at Bellcore. Prof. Willner has 670 publications, including 1 book. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the Optical Society of America (OSA), and he was a Fellow of the Semiconductor Research Corp.

Prof. Joe Campbell, Ph.D., University of Virginia, received his Ph.D. degree in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in 1973. Campbell has co-authored six book chapters, more than 300 journal publications and 200 conference presentations. He is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (and an IEEE Millennium Medal winner), the Optical Society of America (OSA), and the American Physical Society.