Janis A Valdmanis graduated from Purdue University with BS degrees in math and physics and completed his PhD in optics in 1983 at the University of Rochester. He joined the technical staff of AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1983. In 1988, he became an associate professor in the electrical engineering and computer science department at the University of Michigan, where he was associate director of the Ultrafast Science Lab. In 1993, he went to Picometrix LLC where he eventually served as Director of Engineering, High Speed Receivers. He now works at Thorlabs, Inc. as General Manager of the Ultrafast Optoelectronics Team.

Valdmanis is a Fellow of OSA and recipient of the 1988 Adolph Lomb Medal “For the demonstration of electrical waveform analysis by means of the electro-optic effect in conjunction with short optical pulses.”