Mr. Verrant’s presentation will focus on state of the art optical communications systems, with focus on enabling research to government agencies. Topics to be discussed include; fundamentals of optical communications, state of the transport technology, advanced transport and switching techniques, and programmable optical architectures.
Jeff Verrant is the Director of Research and Education Initiatives at Ciena. His interests lie in High Performance Optical Networking for the Federal Government and Research and Education Community. He is responsible for Ciena’s network design solutions within the Dept. of Energy, Dept. of Defense, National Science Foundation, and University markets. His recent projects include the NSF TeraGrid, IWire, ESnet, DOE UltraScience Net, FermiLab and Argonne Lab networks. Recently, Mr. Verrant architected the Internet2 Network and the US-LHCnet. Prior to Ciena, Mr. Verrant was involved in DOD communications and network planning for the past 15 years, as well as engineering positions with McLeod USA, Zaffire, and ONI Systems. Mr. Verrant is also a U.S. Marine Officer with U.S. Strategic Command, where he serves as a space officer in the development of next generation space systems.