The successful marriage between semiconductor optoelectronic devices and low-loss optical fibres has pushed the transmission capacity of a single core fibre from the Megabit level up to the Terabit domain and thereby becoming the main enabler of the Internet.

Hugo de Waardt is an Associate Professor and track leader of high-capacity trunk transmission within the ECO group at the Department of Electrical Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). His key areas of expertise include telecommunication engineering, optical communication, optical amplifiers, opto-electronic transmitters and receivers and high capacity fibre-optic transmission. Hugo’s research interest has always been in trying to reach the highest possible transmission capacity: at first using high speed direct laser modulation in combination with optical pre-amplified detection. Later on, he researched wavelength division multiplexing technologies and optical time domain multiplexing, eventually by exploring few mode transmission in combination with coherent detection.

Hugo de Waardt received his MSc (1980) and PhD (1995) from Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. In 1981, he started his professional carrier in the Physics Department at PTT Research in Leidschendam, The Netherlands, where he worked on the performance issues of opto-electronic devices. In 1989 he moved to the Transmission Department and became involved in WDM high-bit-rate optical transmission. Hugo coordinated the participation of TU/e in ACTS Upgrade, ACTS BLISS, ACTS APEX and IST FASHION. He served as project leader of the national research initiative Freeband Broadband Photonics (2004-2008) and as task manager Broadband Communication in the SmartMix MEMPHIS program (2006-2012).

In recent years he was involved in the FP7 ICT projects MODE-GAP and IDEALIST. Since 2012, he has coordinated the post-doctoral engineering programme in ICT at the faculty of Electrical Engineering at TU/e. In 2016 he was appointed as Director Graduate Program at the selfsame faculty. His interests are in high capacity optical transmission and networking, integrated optics and semiconductor optical amplifiers/modulators. He has (co)authored over 450 conference and journal papers.