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James Kafka is the chief technology officer at Spectra-Physics Lasers, where he has designed the first broadly tunable ultrafast source for microscopy, the first commercial ultrafast Ti: sapphire laser, and the first commercial 10 W solid-state green laser.

Career
Kafka received a Bachelor of Science and Ph.D. in optics from the Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester in 1977 and 1983.

In 1983, Kafka joined Spectra-Physics Lasers as a senior scientist, and currently serves as the company's chief technology officer. Kafka's designs includes the first commercial ultrafast Ti: sapphire laser, a technology that allows for spectral outputs ranging from ultra-narrow single frequencies to wide bandwidths over several hundred nanometers.

Kafka holds the patent for the first diode-pumped double-clad fiber laser, which consists of a single-mode optical fiber core pumped by a high-power coherent laser diode source.

As a Fellow of Optica, Kafka served as Ultrafast Topical Editor for JOSA B, an optics-focused scientific journal, from 1994 to 1995 and the co-chair for the Conference on Laser and Electro-Optics and Advanced Solid-State Photonics conferences. In 2004, he served as a distinguished traveling lecturer in laser science for the American Physical Society.

Kafka received the Thermo Electron Corporate Award for Technical Innovation in 2002 and the Newport Corporation Strategic Patent Award in 2007.

Awards

 * 2002: Thermo Electron Corporate Award for Technical Innovation
 * 2005: Optica Fellow
 * 2007: Newport Corporation Strategic Patent Award

Selected publications
Simon Lefrançois, Khanh Kieu, Yujun Deng, James D. Kafka, and Frank W. Wise, "Scaling of dissipative soliton fiber lasers to megawatt peak powers by use of large-area photonic crystal fiber," Opt. Lett. 35, 1569-1571 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1364/OL.35.001569

Klein, J., Kafka, J. The flexible research tool. Nature Photon 4, 289 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2010.108

J. D. Kafka and T. M. Baer, "Peak power fluctuations in optical pulse compression," in IEEE Journal of Quantum Electronics, vol. 24, no. 2, pp. 341-350, Feb. 1988, doi:10.1109/3.131.