Lumish new CEO and chairman of optical comb company Pilot Photonics

Dr. Stan Lumish, former CTO of JDSU (and member of Lightwave’s Editorial Advisory Board), has been named CEO and chairman of Pilot Photonics Ltd., a company focused on optical comb subsystems development based in Dublin, Ireland. Dr. Lumish replaces Dr. Philip Perry, the founding CEO of the privately held company.

Dr. Perry will remain on Pilot Photonics’ board while he returns to Dublin City University and optical transmission research.

Pilot Photonics develops optical comb source subsystems targeted at next-generation optical communications networks. The subsystems can be used with a variety of multicarrier optical transmission technologies, such as coherent optical OFDM, coherent WDM, and Nyquist WDM.

“We are extremely excited to have Dr. Lumish join the company,” said Dr. Frank Smyth, Pilot Photonics CTO, via a company press release. “He brings an invaluable wealth of experience, industry connections, and business acumen at an important time in the company’s development. Stan will help us take the business to the next level.”

Dr. Lumish has spent more than 25 years in optical networking, with stints at AT&T Bell Labs and Lucent Technologies as well as JDSU. He most recently spent 18 months in Iraq and Afghanistan working for the United States Department of Defense on economic stabilization efforts.

“I’ve been working with Pilot Photonics for several months now; they have a solid technology, a committed team, and are poised for growth,” commented Dr. Lumish in the same release. "As highlighted by recent flex-grid deployments, even 100G per channel is not enough to satisfy the insatiable demand for bandwidth. Pilot Photonics has optical comb source technology to deliver the capacity expansion offered by flex-grid and multicarrier systems. We’re looking forward to this year’s ECOC in Amsterdam where we plan to demonstrate our comb product line.”