Ciena’s Kim Roberts Receives 2019 John Tyndall Award

Kim Roberts, Ciena Corp.’s vice president of WaveLogic Science, has been awarded one of the top honors in the fiber optics community by the Optical Society of America and the IEEE Photonics Society and is being recognized for being a major force in the field of digital signal processing (DSP) for optical transmission systems.

Honored with the John Tyndall Award for his for pioneering contributions to the development of practical coherent communication systems. These range from the Superdecoder (the use of electronic signal processing of optical signals), the OC-48 regenerator, and the original OC-192 (10 Gb/s) system, to terrestrial optical amplifiers and the revolutionary WaveLogic-1 precompensating transmitter.

Kim Roberts.
Roberts built on the those innovations by helping to develop the DSP-assisted coherent transceivers that are at the heart of coherent 40, 100, and 400 Gb/s optical systems and deployed globally.

Optical Society CEO Elizabeth Rogan said Roberts’ work was key to providing a new level of technical solutions in daily communication needs.

“Kim Roberts’ innovations are widely recognized to have transformed optical transmission systems,” she said.

The award is named for John Tyndall, a 19th-century scientist who was the first to demonstrate the phenomenon of total internal reflection. It recognizes an individual who has made pioneering, highly significant, or continuing technical or leadership contributions to fiber optic technology, said IEEE Photonics Society Executive Director Doug Razzano.

“Kim Roberts’ contributions to the development of practical coherent communication systems are exemplary of this prestigious award,” he said.Roberts was also named an IEEE Fellow and a Nortel Fellow and received the Outstanding Engineer medal in 2008 from IEEE Canada.

Roberts holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering with an emphasis on mathematics and a master’s degree in electrical engineering on the topic of processing of brain signals, both from the University of British Columbia.