Dr. Alka Swanson

She left Bell Laboratories in 1996 to enter the business world. Alka became VP of Sales and Marketing at EPITAXX, a detector company and grew sales from $20M to over $200M by starting new product lines. EPITAXX was eventually acquired by JDS Uniphase in 1999.
Since then she has had several executive roles such as a General Manager of a $200M group at JDS Uniphase, NJ; COO/CFO of Princeton Lightwave, NJ; and CEO of COGO Optronics, a German and US company.

Previous to Kelvin Nanotechnology, Alka was a director of Princeton Lightwave (PLI), a sensor company. She was named a non-executive director of PLI in 2008, as a past executive at PLI, growing the supplier from zero to a multi-million dollar revenue company. PLI was acquired by Argo AI, a sensor company initially funded by Ford Motors, in 2017.

At present, in addition to fibeReality, Alka works with Kelvin Nanotechnology based in Glasgow, UK. Kelvin Nanotechnology provides fabrication services for sub-micron feature sizes with applications in advanced optics such as meta lenses, communication lasers, augmented reality and quantum components.

In addition, she is passionate about education because education is a powerful equalizer. Alka helped her father start a non-profit education foundation in Zambia in the late 1990s. She has served on the boards of various non-profit organizations. Currently, Alka volunteers her time at church, the Rotary Club, thrift shop charities, and as an advisor in an education start-up. She resides in North Platte, Nebraska and travels to the UK frequently.