Yan Sun was a vice president at Bookham before he left in December, 2004. Dr. Sun joined Bookham through its acquisition of Onetta where he served as the President. Dr. Yan Sun was a co-founder of Onetta, a pioneer in intelligent optical modules. Yan and his colleagues successfully won top tier customers such as Cisco and went through a tough downturn in the industry. Prior to Onetta, he worked from 1995 to 2000 on optical amplifiers and WDM optical communication systems at Bell Laboratories and optical networking group, Lucent Technologies, as a member of technical staff and then a senior manager. During this period, he and his colleagues discovered, modeled and studied the control schemes of fast power transients in optically amplified networks, and demonstrated the first ultra wide band optical amplifiers and DWDM optical communication systems at terabit level. Between 1985 and 1995, he made numerous contributions in several areas in the fields of microwave electronics, lasers and optics.

Yan is the author or co-author of more than 100 publications and presentations and a co-inventor of 30 patents. He is a lead co-chair for APOC and has served on the committees of numerous international conferences and the editorial board of several technical journals. He was the recipient of several prestigious awards, including the Bell Labs President’s Gold Award from Lucent Technologies and the Innovator of the Year Trophy in Paris , France . A fellow of OSA and a senior member of IEEE, Sun has served as a Guest Professor of Tsinghua University , University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, and Southwest Jiaotong University in China .