xii Author biographies He is currently the Chief Technology Officer for JDSU where he assists in the development of optical architectures and enabling components and sub-systems for next generation agile optical networks. Brandon.collings@jdsu.com. Peter Roorda has over 15 years experience in the design and development of agile optical networks and their key subsystems. In various technical roles at Nortel Networks and Innovance Networks, Peter has developed product concepts and architectures for emerging WDM, ROADM, optical amplifier and high speed transmission technologies. Currently at JDSU, Peter is product line manager for ROADM products. peter.roorda@jdsu.com CHAPTER 3. CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES IN FUTURE HIGH-CAPACITY OPTICAL TRANSMISSION SYSTEMS (XIANG LIU) Xiang Liu received his Ph.D. degree in applied physics from Cornell University in 2000. He joined Bell Labs as a member of technical staff in 2000, and has been working on high-speed optical communication technologies since then. Dr. Liu has authored/coauthored over 190 journal and conference papers, and holds over 35 US patents. He is a senior member of the IEEE and the OSA. xliu20@alcatel-lucent.com CHAPTER 4. OPTICAL AMPLIFIERS: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES (JOHN ZYSKIND AND MAXIM BOLSHTYANSKY) Maxim Bolshtyansky received the M.S. in physics from Chelyabinsk Technical University, Russia in 1993, and the second M.S. and Ph.D. in optical physics from CREOL at University of Central Florida, Orlando, US in 1999. Since that time, he was working in various engineering and research roles at Lucent Technology, Onetta Inc, and is presently employed by JDSU. His research interests include detailed investigation and modeling of the gain media such as Raman and EDF and control algorithms for telecom applications. maxim@jdsu.com