Gerard A. Alphonse is a Haitian-American

electrical engineer Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems that use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

, physicist and research scientist,.

Biography

Alphonse received a BSEE (1958) and MSEE (1959) from

New York University New York University (NYU) is a private university, private research university in New York City, New York, United States. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded in 1832 by Albert Gallatin as a Nondenominational ...

, and a PhD in Electrophysics from

Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute The New York University Tandon School of Engineering (commonly referred to as Tandon) is the engineering and applied sciences school of New York University. Tandon is the second oldest private engineering and technology school in the United St ...

in 1967. As documented in the book by Alexander Magoun, Alphonse spent much of his career at the RCA Labs later to become spun off as the Sarnoff Institute. He invented and demonstrated the world's highest performance superluminescent diode in 1986. The device is a broadband semiconductor light source and key component of next-generation fiber optic gyroscopes, low coherence tomography for medical imaging, and external cavity tunable lasers with applications to fiber optic communications. Alphonse was the 2005 president of the

United States The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...

division of the

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and other related disciplines. The IEEE has a corporate office ...

(IEEE). He has served on several of IEEE's committees and boards. He holds more than 50 U.S. patents, was inducted into the New Jersey Inventors' Hall of Fame in 2005, and in 2016 was honored with the Marcus Garvey Lifetime Achievement Award by the Institute for Caribbean Studies in Washington, D.C.

Personal life

His daughter is the journalist Lylah M. Alphonse.

References

Polytechnic Institute of New York University alumni The College of New Jersey faculty Fellows of the IEEE Living people Year of birth missing (living people) Place of birth missing (living people) American electrical engineers New York University alumni New York University Tandon School of Engineering alumni {{US-electrical-engineer-stub