Stephen E. Ralph is a Professor with the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech. He received the BEE degree in Electrical Engineering with highest honors from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1980. He received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University in 1988 for his work on highly nonequilibrium carrier transport in semiconductor devices.

He is currently the director of the Georgia Electronic Design Center, a cross-disciplinary electronics and photonics research center focused on the synergistic development of high-speed electronic components and signal processing to enable revolutionary system performance. He is also the founder and director of the new Terabit Optical Networking Consortium, an industry led communications and information technology consortium.

Prior to Georgia Tech he held a postdoctoral position at AT&T Bell Laboratories and was a visiting scientist with the Optical Sciences Laboratory at the IBM T. J. Watson research center.

He has published more than 320 peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings and holds 14 patents in the fields of optical communications, optical devices, and signal processing. Professor Ralph has mentored more than 20 Ph.D. students. His current research focus is on high capacity optical systems and interconnects, particularly the intersection of electronics, photonics, and signal processing/machine learning and where integrated photonics is a key area of innovation. Professor Ralph is an elected member of the IEEE Photonics Society Board of Governors and is a Fellow of the Optical Society (OSA).