Eric Swanson is a director, consultant, adviser, and active participant in a variety of industrial, academic, government, and non-profit activities. Mr. Swanson is a research affiliate of the MIT, a participant in the Deshpande Center for Entrepreneurship at MIT, a consultant at Draper Laboratory, on the board of Acacia Communications Incorporated, Curata Incorporated, and NinePoint Medical Incorporated, and editor of www.octnews.org.

Mr. Swanson was a co-founder of three successful start-up companies and a founding board-member of two more. The most recent are Acacia Communications a company focused on ultra-high speed coherent fiber optic transmission modules and Curata Incorporated, a company making content curation Web software. Prior to that, he was a founder of Sycamore Networks, a company developing optical networking products. Mr. Swanson was also a co-founder of LightLab Imaging, a biomedical imaging company focusing on commercializing optical coherence tomography (OCT) for a wide range of medical markets including cardiology & endoscopy. Lightlab was acquired by St. Jude Medical in 2010. Prior to LightLab Imaging, Mr. Swanson was a co-founder of Advanced Ophthalmic Devices, a startup focused on ophthalmologic imaging using OCT. AOD was acquired in 1994 by Carl Zeiss Meditec and served as the basis for Zeiss’s highly successful OCT product line.

Prior to AOD, Mr. Swanson was involved in Research and Development at Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory for 15 years. He served in various technical and managerial roles working on optical networks and Inter-Satellite Laser Communication systems.

Swanson has authored more than 200 technical papers and conference presentations. In addition, he has over 32 US patents and numerous foreign patents. He is a Fellow of the OSA and senior member of the IEEE. In 1992 was a co-recipient of the Rank Prize for contributions in Opto-Electronics for his work in the field of Optical Coherence Tomography. In 2012 he was a co-recipient of the Champalimaud Award for his work in the field of Optical Coherence Tomography.

Mr. Swanson holds a B.S. summa cum laude in Electrical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.