Avicena Appoints Former Oclaro CEO Greg Dougherty to its Board of Directors

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Avicena, provider of advanced LED based optical interconnects for computing, today announced the appointment of Greg Dougherty to its board of directors, effective immediately. Mr. Dougherty brings to the board a proven track record of executive leadership and extensive experience in the optical communications industry, along with strong operational expertise in the development of innovative optical products and technologies.

“We are pleased to welcome an executive of Greg’s caliber to our board of directors,” said Bardia Pezeshki, Avicena CEO. “Greg’s deep industry knowledge and expertise will be invaluable as we move forward with productizing our innovative microLED optical inks, both as standalone optics, and as co-packaged chiplets for inter-processor and processor to memory interconnects in compute clusters. Greg’s insights and guidance will be tremendous assets to the company and our investors.”

Mr. Dougherty is currently serving as a Director at Infinera and MaxLinear. He served as Chief Executive Officer of Oclaro from June 2013 until its acquisition by Lumentum in December 2018 for $1.8B. He also served as a director of Oclaro from April 2009 to the completion of the sale in December 2018. Prior to Oclaro, Mr. Dougherty served as a director of Avanex Corporation, a leading global provider of intelligent photonic solutions, from April 2005 to April 2009, when Avanex and Bookham merged to form Oclaro. Mr. Dougherty also served as a director of Picarro, Inc., a manufacturer of ultra-sensitive gas spectroscopy equipment using laser-based technology, from October 2002 to August 2013, and as its Interim Chief Executive Officer from January 2002 to April 2004. He also served on the board of the Ronald McDonald House at Stanford from January 2004 to December 2009, and the Bay Area Make-A-Wish Foundation. Earlier in his career, Mr. Dougherty served as the Chief Operating Officer at SDL from 1997 to 2001, when the company was acquired by JDS Uniphase Corporation, where he continued in the role until 2002. From 1989 to 1997, Mr. Dougherty also held executive positions at Lucent Technologies Microelectronics in the Optoelectronics Strategic Business Unit.

“I’m honored to join the Avicena board,” said Mr. Dougherty. “I had the pleasure of working with some team members many years ago, and now I am excited to help move this innovative interconnect technology to product stage thereby solving what is probably the biggest bottleneck in advanced electronics.”

About Avicena

AvicenaTech, Corp. is a privately held company located in Sunnyvale, CA, developing LightBundle, a next generation optical interconnect architecture for AI/ML, HPC, sensors, 5G wireless and aerospace applications. This unique, flexible ultra-low energy technology is based on microLEDs, offering both very high bandwidth and low latency. Now, system designers can disaggregate functions like compute and memory and radically grow system throughput. Avicena’s technology is a key building block in the evolution of networking and computing that will reduce the energy impact on our planet.

For more information, visit https://avicena.tech