Robert C. Gardner

For 19 years, Robert C. Gardner has worked in engineering and management roles in the product development and new product manufacturing groups of both Fortune 500 and start-up companies. Most of this period was at Hewlett-Packard/Agilent, but most recently Mr. Gardner has served as vice president of engineering in three different emerging optical networking companies. During his 15 years with Hewlett-Packard/Agilent, Mr. Gardner was involved in the investigation, development, and deployment of both low- and high-volume optical and electronic components and sub-systems, one of which is shipping over one million devices each day. Devices ranged from workstation hardware, light emitting diodes (LEDs), printer components, digital cameras, microdisplays, and electronic packaging. These products typically entailed initial work in Silicon Valley and included the transfer to production and process stabilization in either the external supply base or captive production facilities in Southeast Asia. In the start-up community, products have ranged across the first optical switch matrices, erbium-doped fiber, photonic band-gap devices, RFID tags, and optical integrated circuits.

Mr. Gardner earned his master's degree in management from MIT, where his thesis topic was organizational and market factors affecting market acceptance of emerging technologies. He also holds a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Rice University. While at Hewlett-Packard/Agilent, he was awarded three US patents in the fields of LEDs and fiber-optics, but more importantly has been responsible for groups that have generated between 50 and 100 patents.