Santa Clara, CA, March 19, 2004--Luis Spinelli has been appointed to the newly created position of executive vice president and chief technology officer of Coherent. Spinelli has more than 25 years of experience in the photonics industry, including almost 19 years at Coherent. He joined Coherent in May 1985 and until April 1997 held various engineering and managerial positions. In February 1998, he led Coherent's Advanced Research Unit (ARU) from its inception, whose charter is to identify and evaluate new and emerging technologies of interest for the Company across a range of disciplines in the laser field. Since October 2002 Spinelli has served as vice president for corporate research and as chair of the company's Technical Advisory Board.
Spinelli has been instrumental in the development of a number of Coherent's technologies and products, including deep ultra-violet frequency-doubled ion lasers for semiconductor manufacturing and telecom applications. He is one of the inventors of Kerr lens mode-locking, one of the most widely used techniques to generate ultra-short pulses in solid-state lasers. In addition, under his direction, the ARU pioneered the development of optically pumped semiconductors lasers.