Franko Kueppers - Bio sketch

Dr. Franko Kueppers received his B.Sc./Dipl.-Ing.(FH) in Electrical Engineering from the University of Applied Sciences Gießen-Friedberg, his M.Sc./Dipl.-Ing. in Communications Engineering from Kassel University, and his Ph.D./Dr.-Ing. in Optical Communications Engineering from Kaiserslautern University of Technology.

For almost ten years, he was with the Research and Technology Center of Deutsche Telekom, Darmstadt, Germany, where he became Principal Investigator and Technical Program Manager for optical communications related R&D projects. He directed the research group Optical Networks and served as the head of the Photonic Systems department until December 2002.

In January 2003, Dr. Kueppers joined the College of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona where he started the Photonic Telecommunication Systems research group and laboratory. He was one of the initiators of the NSF Engineering Research Center for Integrated Access Networks (www.cian-erc.org) where he served as a PI of the Optical Networking project, co-lead the Intelligent Aggregation Networking working group, and directed the multi-institutional System Integration Testbed.

During his tenure at the College of Optical Sciences, Dr. Kueppers participated in outreach activities and enjoyed teaching graduate as well as undergraduate courses for which he received the Award of Distinction for Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching.

For his scientific work, he received the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award as well as the Science Foundation Arizona (SFAz) Competitive Advantage Award.

In January 2011, Dr. Kueppers joined the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at Darmstadt University of Technology (TU Darmstadt) Germany, where he serves as the Chair of Photonics and Optical Communications and as the Director of the Institute of Microwave Engineering and Photonics.

His research interests are in photonic components and technologies, high-speed TDM and high-capacity WDM fiber-optic transmission technologies, photonic signal processing, and optical transport networks. In these fields, he co-authored more than 50 scientific articles and has been invited to speak at various international conferences.