Masoud Vaziri, PhD, has been appointed vice president of photonics at TXP Corp., a Richardson, Texas, original design manufacturer for the communications industry, the company announced today. He will oversee the photonics laboratory and support TXP's optical network termination (ONT) team with interoperability activities and new product development. Vaziri has more than 10 years of experience in optical system design and optical networking systems. He was formely vice president of photonics systems at Menara Networks, working on high-performance subsystems for next-generation optical networks. He has also been on the scientific staff for optical system design at Nortel Networks and later in his career re-joined the firm as director of lightwave system design3. At Nortel, he participated in the design of its 10 Gb/s system and developed optical measurement techniques. Vaziri was previously a member of the technical staff and manager of the technology group at Siemens, where he developed the optical system characterization methodology for TransXpress Infinity, a 10 Gb/s DWDM (dense wavelength division multiplexing) system.