“The appointment of Dr Chen leverages his deep experience as a distinguished scientist as well as his broad view of the technology opportunities gained from his time with Bell Labs and Darpa,” said Dr Vincent Mattera, chair and CEO. “As DCTO, Dr Chen will work closely with Dr Eng to chart the future technical direction of our company, including the creation of new materials for energy generation, transmission, and storage, basic research around next-generation quantum technologies, breakthroughs required for the sixth generation of wireless networks, and the adoption of digital technologies, machine learning, and artificial intelligence across our operations and in our products and services.”

Prior to being named DCTO, Dr Chen was chief scientist in Coherent’s new ventures and wide-bandgap electronics technologies group. Before joining Coherent in 2021, he was a program manager at Darpa, where he initiated and managed programs in advanced semiconductor electronics, secured communications, and artificial intelligence and machine learning processing. Dr Chen was previously a senior director at Nokia Bell Labs, responsible for advanced research and technology development in high-speed electronics and optoelectronics including integrated lasers, silicon photonics, coherent optical data links, and wireless backhaul transceivers.

He received his PhD from Cornell University in electrical engineering, is a fellow of Bell Labs, IEEE, and Optica, a member of the National Academy of Engineering; and recipient of the IEEE David Sarnoff Award and the Edison Patent Award. He has authored or co-authored three book chapters and more than 190 journal articles, and holds 33 US patents.