Dr. Jinendra Ranka

Program Manager

Dr. Jinendra K. Ranka joined the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in 2008 as a program manager in the Strategic Technology Office. He received his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1991 and his Ph.D. degree in Applied and Engineering Physics from Cornell University in 1998. Dr. Ranka came to DARPA from MIT Lincoln Laboratory where he was a member of the Quantum Electronics Group. From 2000 to 2003, he was a Principal Engineer at Sycamore Networks, working on high-speed optical network and system design. From 1997 to 2000, he was a Member of the Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories, where he conducted research in the area of nonlinear optics and microstructure optical fibers. His work includes the first demonstration of an optical fiber with anomalous dispersion at visible wavelengths, and the first demonstration of a broadband optical continuum generated in microstructure fibers. This work has been a key enabler in the field of optical frequency metrology, and was cited in the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Dr. Ranka is the author of more than 40 technical papers and conference proceedings. He is currently a Deputy Editor of Optics Letters and is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America.