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Dr. Jo Major is Chairman of the Board, President, and Chief Executive Officer of Avanex. He has an extensive record of accomplishment as a senior executive in tier-one businesses. Dr. Major�s experience includes internal and acquisition expertise in product development and introduction, especially with regard to driving the development of highly differentiated products from the design stage to manufacturing.
Dr. Major has spent 14 years with JDS Uniphase Corporation and with SDL, Inc. before its merger with JDS in 2001. At JDS Uniphase, he served successively as Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Components Business Group, as Vice President and General Manager of the Active Components Business Group and as Vice President and General Manager of the Optical Pump Business Unit.
At various times during his career with JDS Uniphase, Dr. Major was responsible for business unit profit and loss, customer and product line marketing, product development, product engineering, contract negotiation and forecasting, as well as rationalization and loading of factories in San Jose and Santa Clara, California; Victoria, British Columbia; Plymouth, United Kingdom; Ewing, New Jersey; Windham, Connecticut; Eindhoven, Holland, and Shenzhen, China. His product line responsibilities included pump lasers, receivers, source lasers, and lithium niobate modulators; all passive product lines, including passive modules, and waveguide product groups.
Dr. Major began his professional career at SDL, Inc. as a Research Scientist. He subsequently was promoted to Staff Scientist, to Senior Engineering Section Manager of the Communications Business Unit, to Director of Product Development of the Communications Business Unit and to Director of the Communications Business Unit.
At the time of the SDL and JDS merger, he was Vice President of the Optical Pump Business Unit, with responsibility for all pump laser products, erbium-doped amplifiers, Raman amplifiers and fiber Bragg gratings
As a Research Scientist, he was involved in the first demonstration and commercial introduction of the 980 nm pump laser diode, the commercial introduction of 2 micron lasers and the commercial introduction of high-power 250 mW 852 nm pump lasers for atomic (Ce) clocks. These devices remain the highest power frequency-stabilized laser diodes ever commercialized.
Dr. Major earned his Ph.D., M.S. and B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois. He was an Intel Fellow from 1988-1990, and also has studied finance, marketing and business management at Stanford University. | 