OC Lab Supervisor
The Optical Communications Laboratory is led by Professor Alan E. Willner. 
Professor Willner’s full resume contains all the lab publications.
Prof. Willner’s biographical sketch
Prof. Willner’s page on Google Scholar
willner (at) usc.edu
A. Willner’s Non-technical Articles:
Optica (formerly OSA) Willner President’s Message
OSA Optics & Photonics News Career Focus Articles by Willner
IEEE Photonics Society Willner President’s Column
OC Lab Students
During the study, OC Lab students generally have dozens of refereed publications and some of them were:
- selected as Editors’ Pick in JOSA B
- selected as Editors’ Pick in Optics Letters
- selected as a “Highly Cited Paper” by Web of Science in the Physics category (top 1% in citations amongst physics publications)
- selected by editors as one of two papers for that month to appear in OSA Spotlight on Optics
- selected by editors for Cover Art in APL Photonics
- selected by Nature Photonics editors for press release, interview, and News & Views article
OCLAB students attended multiple conferences yearly and some of their submissions were:
- CLEO Postdeadline Paper
- ECOC Postdeadline Paper
- FiO Postdeadline Paper
- OFC Postdeadline Paper
- highly ranked by the CLEO subcommittee and upgraded to the Invited Paper status
- highly ranked by the IPC subcommittee and upgraded to the Invited Paper status
- selected by the ECOC subcommittee as the “Highly Scored papers”
- selected by the ECOC subcommittee as the “Top-Ranked papers”
- selected by the ECOC subcommittee as the “Top-Scored papers”
- selected by the OFC subcommittee as the “Top-Scored Papers”
- upgraded by the CLEO subcommittee to an invited “Highlighted Talk”
OCLAB students received various honors/awards including:
- Globecom Best Paper Award
- IEEE Graduate Student Fellowship
- Jean Bennett Memorial Student Travel Grant
- OSA Foundation and Corning Incorporated Award
- PSC Tingye Li Memorial Scholarship
- Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship
- SPIE Optics and Photonics Education Scholarships
- USC Graduate School Travel/Research Award
- USC MHI Ph.D. Scholars
- USC WiSE Merit Award
After their graduation, some OCLAB alumni joined different companies including:
- Amazon
- Huawei
- Infinera
- Intel
- Juniper Networks
- Marvell Technology
- Maxim Integrated
- Micron Technology
- Microsoft
- Nokia
- Northrop Grumman
- Qualcomm
- SpaceX
- TE SubCom
- Texas Instruments
- Xerox
Some OCLAB alumni continued their academic research in:
- Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt University
- City University of New York
- Hong Kong Polytechnic University
- Jet Propulsion Laboratory
- King Saud University
- Korea Institute of Science and Technology
- Nankai University
- National Tsing Hua University
- Southwest Jiaotong University
- Tianjin University
- University of Houston
- University of Louisiana at Lafayette
- University of Melbourne
- University of Minnesota Duluth
Some OCLAB alumni became:
- IEEE Fellow
- OSA Fellow
Some OCLAB alumni served on the editorial board of:
- Journal of Lightwave Technology
- IEEE Photonics Journal
- IEEE Transactions on Communications
- Light: Science & Applications
- Optics Communications
- Optics Express
- Optics Letters