Dr. Aref Chowdhury is the Chief Technology Officer Optics at Nokia. He received his Bachelor of Engineering from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1994 in electrical engineering and applied mathematics and statistics, and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2001. From 1995 to 1997, he worked as a Senior Engineer for Alcatel CIT.

After his Ph.D., he joined the Optical Physics Research Department of Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey, USA as a Member of Technical Staff in 2001. He has pursued research in the areas of nonlinear optics, negative refractive index metamaterials, optical fiber communication, and white LED lighting. From 2008 to 2010, he served as Senior Manager of Intellectual Property and Standards.

Since 2011, he has been in his current position as CTO Optics. He currently serves OSA as Chair of the Meetings Council, Member of the Fellows Committee, and Member of the OIDA Executive Forum Planning Committee. He previously also served as the Chair of the Board of Meetings and Chair of the Photonics and Optoelectronics Division. Dr. Chowdhury is a recipient of the MIT TR100 Young Innovator Award, a Bell Labs Fellow and an OSA Fellow.