Chen, Zhangyuan is a professor in School of Electronics, Peking University, and has served as the director of State Key Laboratory of Advanced Optical Communication Systems & Networks (Beijing division) since 2012 and the deputy dean of the Department of Electronics since 2015. He received his BS, MS and Ph.D. degrees from Peking University in 1991, 1994 and 1997, respectively. Since 1999, he has been with Peking University as an Associate Professor (1999-2004), and Full Professor (2004-present) of Electronics Engineering. He worked as a visiting scholar in COMELEC Department of Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommunications of France (1998), and in EECS Department of UC Berkeley (2005-2006). His main research interest is in the area of optical communication and photonics.

Dr. Chen has published more than 300 research papers, and most of them are published in top-tier conferences and journals, such as OFC, ECOC, CLEO, and Optics Letters, Optics Express, Journal of Lightwave Technology, IEEE Photonics Technology Letters, IEEE Photonics Journal, and Journal of Optical Communications and Networking. He has served as the Co-Chair of iNOW 2007 and 2010, Co-Chair of the Technical Program Committee of 2014 Asia Communications and Photonics (ACP) Conference, and in the Technical Program Committee of various international conferences. He is serving as an executive council member of the Beijing Institute of Communications. He was the chief scientist of the Petabit Optical Networking Project in National Basic Research Program (973 Program) of China from 2010 to 2014.

Prof. Chen has more than ten research projects funded by NSFC, 973 program, 863 project, etc. His research achievements are summarized as follows:

1) High speed optical fiber transmission techniques: One major research topic in this field is to increase the capacity and reach of the optical fiber transmission. He proposed some new signal formats and system architectures to increase the spectral efficiency and capacity of the optical fiber transmission, and new equalization methods to mitigate the physical impairment in the optical link. Several fiber transmission records were achieved using the proposed architectures.

2) Optical networking: The goal is to make the optical network infrastructure more efficient, scalable, and flexible. He led a consortium, comprising of the teams from six universities and institutes and funded by 973 program of China, to focus on the petabit elastic optical networking. New spectrum-flexible switching mechanism and network architecture, dynamic routing and spectrum assignment approaches, virtualized optical network protocol, and elastic optical network testbed were proposed and demonstrated to support the petabit elastic optical network.

3) Microwave photonics: This is an interdisciplinary field that brings together the worlds of optics and radio frequency. He proposed and demonstrated tunable optoelectronic oscillators with record tuning range, low phase noise and wideband optical comb generation, programmable microwave photonic filter with arbitrary shape and linear phase, bi-directional 60GHz radio-over-fiber system with multi-Gigabit multi-level modulation format. These devices and schemes can increase the bandwidth, dynamic range and capacity of next generation hybrid access network, radar, and instrument.