Dave Welch Joins OSA Board, Named IEEE Fellow

Dave Welch, PhD, chief marketing and strategy officer at Infinera, has received two industry honors recognizing his key role in the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company's development of the first commercial large-scale photonic integrated circuits (PICs) for telecommunications applications. Welch has been elected to the board of directors of the Optical Society of America (OSA), the nonprofit association that promotes the study of optics and photonics, by a vote of OSA members. His three-year term begins Jan. 1. In a separate honor, Welch was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), which cited his "contributions to semiconductor lasers and photonic integrated circuits." Fellowship in the IEEE recognizes important individual contributions to engineering and is conferred by invitation of the institute's board of directors. As a cofounder of Infinera, Welch played a leading role in optical system innovations for telecom, helping the company develop its PICs, which contain more than 60 optical devices on a pair of monolithic indium phosphide chips. From 1985 until 2001, he worked at SDL Inc. (now part of JDSU), where he was responsible for many of the company's semiconductor laser and pump laser products for optical telecom networks. Welch has received more than 80 patents and authored more than 250 published articles.