News Release

Contact: Chris McManes
Senior Public Relations Coordinator
Phone: + 1 202 785 0017, ext. 8356
E-Mail: c.mcmanes@ieee.org

Princeton Engineer, Inventor Becomes IEEE-USA President,
Cites Innovation and Offshoring as Major Concerns

WASHINGTON (06 January 2005) — Dr. Gerard A. Alphonse of Princeton, N.J., an IEEE Fellow who holds more than 50 U.S. patents, became IEEE-USA president on New Year’s Day.

One of Alphonse’s major goals is for IEEE-USA to tackle issues relating to innovation and offshore outsourcing (offshoring). He hopes to bring together technical workers and key stakeholders from government, industry and academia to advance equitable solutions to the transfer of high-value, high-wage jobs overseas.

“It’s more than just a jobs issue,” Alphonse said. “Even more fundamental is how the United States and other nations will ensure their economic prosperity, national defense and standard of living in an increasingly competitive, technology-based global economy. Success requires that the United States be more productive and innovative than our competitors.

“My goal as IEEE-USA’s 2005 president is to make sure key decision makers are aware of the needs of the U.S. technical workers who are responsible for that technological innovation.”

Alphonse is a founder and senior vice president of advanced technologies for Medeikon Corp., a developer of optical technology for medical diagnostics and therapy in Ewing, N.J. For 43 years beginning in 1959, he worked in a broad range of technical areas for the Sarnoff Corp., formerly RCA Laboratories. He was awarded four RCA/Sarnoff Technical Achievement Awards.

In 1986 Alphonse invented and demonstrated the world’s highest performance superluminescent diode. 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.

Alphonse taught in the Electronic Physics Department at La Salle University’s evening division in Philadelphia from 1967-82. During his last four years, he served as department head and also taught electrical engineering courses in linear systems, communications and microwave theory at the College of New Jersey in Ewing. He was appointed a consultant to the National Science Foundation for a two-year term in 1975.

Alphonse began his IEEE volunteer career in the 1960s as secretary/treasurer of the Princeton Central Jersey Section, and became Section chair in 1970. He has worked on numerous IEEE committees and boards, and in 2002-03, served as Region 1 director and member of the IEEE Board of Directors. Alphonse is a member of the IEEE Lasers and Electo-Optical Society and was elected to the board of the IEEE Engineering Management Society in 2003. He received an IEEE Millennium Award in 2000.

Alphonse, who speaks four languages, is a native of Haiti who came to the United States as a college student in 1954 at age 18. He arrived with two suitcases, one for books and one for clothes, and lived in a New York University dormitory for four years. Alphonse earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from NYU in 1958 and 1959, respectively. He added a doctorate in electrophysics from Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute in 1967.

The author or co-author of more than 120 technical papers, Alphonse is a member of the Eta Kappa Nu, Tau Beta Pi and Sigma Xi honorary societies and the Science & Art Committee of Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute.

For more on Alphonse’s vision for IEEE-USA, see www.ieeeusa.org/communications/presidentscolumn/Alphonse/alphonsejan05.html.

IEEE-USA is an organizational unit of the IEEE. It was created in 1973 to advance the public good and promote the careers and public policy interests of the more than 225,000 technology professionals who are U.S. members of the IEEE. The IEEE is the world's largest technical professional society. For more information, go to www.ieeeusa.org.

###

IEEE-USA
1828 L Street, N.W., Suite 1202
Washington, DC 20036-5104
Phone: 202-785-0017, Fax: 202-785-0835

Last Update:  15 May 2007
Staff Contact: Pender M. McCarter, p.mccarter@ieee.org