Frank J. Effenberger ’95PhD is considered a world expert in the field of fiber access networks and passive optical networks. In 2008, he became the chairman of International Telecommunication Union, the United Nations’ specialized agency for information and communication technologies. In 2011, he was named as Huawei Fellow, and, in 2015, he was named as a fellow of both the OSA and the IEEE. He holds 60 U.S. patents. Before joining his current company in 2006, Frank was a systems engineer at Motorola. Prior to that, he served at Quantum Bridge Communications, where he managed the system engineering group. He also held other positions in the fiber optics industry, with Science Application International Corporation, Bell Communications and Discovery Semiconductors. He earned his undergraduate in engineering and engineering physics in 1988 at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., and a master’s degree in optics from the University of Rochester in 1989, ranking first in his class.