Stewart Personick

Stewart D. Personick
Born	1947
Alma mater	City College of New York MIT
Scientific career
Fields	Optical communication
Thesis	Efficient analog communication over quantum channels
Doctoral advisor	Robert S. Kennedy

Stewart David Personick (born 1947) is an American researcher in telecommunications and computer networking. He worked at Bell Labs, TRW, and Bellcore (now Telcordia Technologies), researching optical fiber receiver design, propagation in multi-mode optical fibers, time-domain reflectometry, and the end-to-end modeling of fiber-optic communication systems.

Personick was born in Brooklyn in 1947 and attended the Bronx High School of Science. He graduated from the City College of New York with bachelor of electrical engineering degree in 1967 and joined Bell Laboratories. He obtained an SM degree in 1968 and Sc.D degree in 1970 from MIT with support from Bell Laboratories. His dissertation was on analog communication over quantum channels.

At Bell Labs Personick conducted early research in fiber optics technology, including publication of papers on optical receiver design, applications of optical amplifiers, and propagation in multi-mode optical fibers with mode coupling. Some of his early analysis developed a model that included what became known as "the Personick integrals" as basic parameters for the capacity of optical systems. His research was used in early fiber-optic system field tests, including a 1976 experiment in Atlanta, Georgia, and the 1977 Chicago lightwave communication project, which demonstrated the technical and economic viability of optical fiber systems. In 1976 he invented the first practical optical time-domain reflectometer, a test instrument that became heavily used in the fiber optics industry.

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