Gerard A. Alphonse

Gerard A. Alphonse is a Haitian-American electrical engineer,^[1] physicist and research scientist,.

Biography

Alphonse received a BSEE (1958) and MSEE (1959) from New York University, and a PhD in Electrophysics from Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute in 1967.^[2]

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.^[3] 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.^[4]

Alphonse was the 2005 president of the United States division of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He has served on several of IEEE's committees and boards.^[5]

He holds more than 50 U.S. patents,^[6] was inducted into the New Jersey Inventors' Hall of Fame in 2005,^[7] and in 2016 was honored with the Marcus Garvey Lifetime Achievement Award by the Institute for Caribbean Studies in Washington, D.C.^[8]

Personal life

His daughter is the journalist Lylah M. Alphonse.^[9]