Luis Spinelli Named CTO at Coherent

SANTA CLARA, Calif., March 19 -- Luis Spinelli has been appointed executive vice president and CTO of Coherent Inc. Spinelli has more than 25 years of experience in the photonics industry, including almost 19 years at Coherent. Since October 2002, he has served as vice president for corporate research and as chairman of the company’s technical advisory board.

He has been instrumental in the development of a number of Coherent’s technologies and products, such as deep ultraviolet frequency-doubled ion lasers for semiconductor manufacturing and telecommunications applications. He is one of the inventors of Kerr lens mode-locking, one of the most widely used techniques to generate ultrashort pulses in solid-state lasers.

In February 1998, he led Coherent’s Advanced Research Unit (ARU) from its inception. Under his direction, the ARU pioneered the development of optically pumped semiconductor lasers.

For more information, visit: www.cohr.com