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Jerry S. Rawls is an American businessman and philanthropist. He is the co-founder and chairman of Finisar.
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Jerry S. Rawls is an American businessman and philanthropist. He is the co-founder and chairman of Finisar.
Jerry Rawls was born in Houston, Texas, and graduated from Bellaire High School in Houston in 1962. He earned his Bachelor of Science Degree in Mechanical Engineering from Texas Tech University in 1967. While at Texas Tech, he played freshman basketball, was an officer of Phi Gamma Delta fraternity, and was a member of several other student organizations. He went on to earn a Master of Science Degree in Industrial Administration from the Krannert School of Management at Purdue University in 1968.
He joined Raychem Corporation, a materials science and engineering company in Menlo Park, California and began a twenty-year career with them. He served in various capacities including National Sales Manager and Manager of Product Marketing. During his last six years there, he was General Manager of two divisions.
In 1988,he co-founded Finisar Corporation, a fiber optics company, with Frank H. Levinson. [1] The goal for Finisar was to build cost effective gigabit optical transceivers to provide the optical input and output for high-speed computer networks. In 1992, Finisar proposed using multi-mode optics to dramatically lower the cost of gigabit optical links in data centers. Finisar’s proposal for gigabit multimode optics was adopted by the ANSI committee as the basis for today’s Fibre Channel Standard and later by the IEEE as the Gigabit Ethernet Standard.
In 1999 the company went public and raised $149.3 million. By the close of trading on the first day Finisar stock rose 373%, making Finisar the seventh largest first day gainer in the history of Wall Street at that time. The company now employs 9,000 people and has facilities and operations in California as well as in Dallas, Philadelphia, Boston, Champaign-Urbana, Malaysia, Singapore, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Sweden, Denmark, India and Korea.
Forbes included Jerry in one of its lists of Corporate America’s 500 Most Powerful People.
The Rawls College of Business and The Rawls Course at Texas Tech University are named for him. On October 2, 2003, Rawls Hall at Purdue University was also named in honor of Rawls.
Texas Tech University is a public research university in Lubbock, Texas. Established on October 2, 1923, and called Texas Technological College until 1969, it is the flagship institution of the five-institution Texas Tech University System. As of Fall 2023, the university enrolled 40,944 students, making it the sixth-largest university in Texas. Over 25% of its undergraduate student population identifies as Hispanic, so the university has been designated a Hispanic-serving institution (HSI).
Rawls is a surname. Notable people with the surname include:
The Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr. School of Business is the school of business at Purdue University, a public research university in West Lafayette, Indiana. It offers instruction at the undergraduate, master's, and doctoral levels.
Gregory Hammond Olsen is an American entrepreneur, engineer and scientist who, in October 2005, became the third private citizen to make a self-funded trip to the International Space Station with the company Space Adventures.
Multi-mode optical fiber is a type of optical fiber mostly used for communication over short distances, such as within a building or on a campus. Multi-mode links can be used for data rates up to 800 Gbit/s. Multi-mode fiber has a fairly large core diameter that enables multiple light modes to be propagated and limits the maximum length of a transmission link because of modal dispersion. The standard G.651.1 defines the most widely used forms of multi-mode optical fiber.
Bala S. Manian is an Indian-born Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has started a string of medical technology companies such as ReaMetrix, Digital Optics and Quantum Dot Corporation. Some of the resulting technologies have also had applications in the film industry, earning Manian an Academy Award certificate for technical achievement.
Arthur Gene "Art" Hansen was a philanthropist and former chancellor of several American universities.
Microtek International Inc. is a Taiwan-based multinational manufacturer of digital imaging products and other consumer electronics. It produces imaging equipment for medical, biological and industrial fields. It occupies 20 percent of the global imaging market and holds 450 patents worldwide.
The Rawls College of Business is the business school of Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. Rawls Business offers curriculum for both undergraduate and graduate students and received its initial business accreditation in 1958 from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB). Established in 1942, Texas Tech's business school was originally known as the Division of Commerce. In 1956, the school was renamed the College of Business Administration. Following a $25 million gift from alumnus Jerry S. Rawls in 2000, the school was renamed as Jerry S. Rawls College of Business Administration.
The University of Arizona College of Optical Sciences, considered the largest institute for optics education in the United States, is dedicated to research and education in optics with an emphasis on optical engineering. The college offers more than 90 courses in optical sciences, and a Bachelor of Science degree in Optical Sciences and Engineering, Masters and Doctoral degree programs in Optical Sciences, as well as a dual master's degree in Optical Sciences and Business Administration. The college also offers comprehensive distance learning courses leading to a Professional Graduate Certificate or a master's degree and markets non-credit short courses on DVD to optics professionals.
Okan Kadri Ersoy is a professor of electrical engineering and director of Statistical and Computational Intelligence Laboratory at Purdue University, West Lafayette School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He is a Fellow of IEEE, a Fellow of OSA and a Fellow of ISIBM. Ersoy contributed to the research and education in computer science and engineering, artificial intelligence and bioinformatics. He is on the editorial boards of International Journal of Functional Informatics and Personalized Medicine and International Journal of Computational Biology and Drug Design. He is also on the advisory board of IJCBS.
Duncan T. Moore was president of the Optical Society of America in 1996 and was awarded the society's Edwin H. Land Medal in 2009.
Eric Van Stryland was president of the Optical Society of America in 2005.
Finisar Corporation is a manufacturer of optical communication components and subsystems.
West Coast University (WCU) is a private, for-profit university focused on healthcare degrees with campus locations in Los Angeles, Anaheim, and Ontario, California; Richardson, Texas; and Miami, Florida. David Pyle founded American Career College in 1979 under the name of American College of Optics. Originally the school focused only on optical dispensing. In May 1997, Pyle purchased West Coast University, which was chartered by the State of California in 1909, out of bankruptcy, and developed a program for the training of registered nurses.
Robert Blair Stobaugh was an American educator noted for his research into energy economics and corporate governance.
National Technological University (NTU), Fort Collins, Colorado, was founded in 1984 as a non-profit organization offering graduate courses via satellite and leading to a Master of Science (M.S.) degree. It was a collaborative effort among many major engineering and management colleges in the United States to meet the graduate and continuing education needs of "engineers, technical professionals and managers using advanced educational and telecommunications technology." Graduate and non-credit courses were sourced from a number of distinguished universities and were delivered through NTU to working technical professionals and managers at corporate and government sites across the United States and at international locations as well. NTU was accredited by the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, The Higher Learning Commission
Malin Kenneth Oshman was an American business person and Silicon Valley pioneer. Oshman and three former classmates from Rice University founded ROLM, initially a maker of rugged military computers, in 1969. In 1988, he became chief executive officer of Echelon Corporation.
Kevin Rolland Thompson was the Group Director, Research and Development/Optics at Synopsys, Inc. His work contributed to developments in nanolithography, astrophysics and the advancement of optics