Alan E. Willner

Alan E. Willner is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California. He is also president of the Optical Society.

Willner is known for his research on optical fiber communications and free-space communications. Willner's doctoral advisor was Robert W. Boyd.

He is a recipient of the Paul F. Forman Engineering Excellence Award and several other distinctions.

In early 2016, Dean Yannis Yortsos announced that "Alan is the 10th USC Viterbi faculty elected to the NAE since 2008, with all his academic career done at USC. ... He is an International Fellow of the U.K. Royal Academy of Engineering, as well as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; IEEE; National Academy of Inventors; the Optical Society (OSA); and SPIE. He received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the IEEE Eric Sumner Award, and a Presidential Faculty Fellows Award from the White House.”

Willner is President of the OSA and editor in chief of several of their publications.