Laurent Schares

Laurent Schares is a senior research scientist at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY, USA, where his research focuses on advanced optical networking and on scheduling for Cloud, AI and HPC systems. He has led or contributed to numerous projects on integrating optical technologies into future networks, on Cloud/HPC resource allocation, and on optical switch and interconnect demonstrations in computing systems, for which he has received an IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement and multiple Research Division awards. He has more than 150 publications, 20+ issued patents and is a senior member of the IEEE and Optica. He received his diploma (MS) and PhD degrees in physics from ETH Zurich in 1998 and 2004, respectively.

Dr. Schares has been a longtime volunteer organizing the Optical Fiber Communications Conference (OFC), having served as a Technical Program Chair for 2017, as General Chair for 2019 and as the Chair of the Steering Committee since 2021. He is the deputy editor-in-chief and an editorial board member of the IEEE/OSA Journal of Optical Communications and Networking (JOCN). He has been a guest editor for a Special JOCN Issue on Optical Data Center Networks in 2018 and two JLT special issues on OFC. He has given many invited talks and has widely served in the optical communications community, on funding resp. award selection committees, and in various roles on technical program committees of leading conferences/symposia (CLEO 2019-21, OFC 2012-2019, OECC 2016, OSA Adv Phot Congr (APC) 2016, IEEE Summer Topicals 2013/2017, HiPEAC (AISTECS Workshop) 2014-2018, IEEE MCSoC 2017-2020, IEEE Hot Interconnects 2021).

Outside of work, he has been a longtime AYSO youth soccer coach and referee, and he has widely volunteered to promote STEM education in schools.