Talk:Valentin Gapontsev

Disclosing conflict of interest/request to add content

Hello,

I would like to openly disclose that I am an employee of a firm that is employed by IPG Photonics. It is the intention of my firm to share a fuller and more comprehensive biography on Mr. Gapontsev's Wikipedia page, which is lacking important content. We are committed to adding content that is factual, verifiable, and unbiased, and would very much appreciate the help of this community in publishing this information. The text we would like to include is as follows - we would appreciate it if the editors of this page could add as much of this information as they deem justified according to the given citations.

Text:

Valentin P. Gapontsev (born 23 February 1939) is the founder, CEO and chairman of IPG Photonics.

Early Life and Education Valentin Gapontsev was born in Moscow early in the Second World War, the son of an artillery captain. In 1946, he moved with his family to Lvov in western Ukraine, where they lived for the next 20 years. Dr. Gapontsev was educated at the Lvov Polytechnic Institute and the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, receiving a PhD. From 1967 until the early 1990s, he worked at the Soviet Academy of Science, where he held the positions of Senior Scientist in Laser Material Physics and Head of Laboratory (1).

Career As the Soviet Union fell apart, Gapontsev developed a new kind of laser – the optic fiber laser – that has many more industrial applications than traditional lasers. He founded the company that would become IPG in the basement of his laboratory. The poor conditions for high-tech entrepreneurs and absence of a laser market in Russia in the early 1990s led Dr. Gapontsev to other places. He first took his company to Germany, where he worked with Italian and German telecom and aerospace customers, and then to the United States through a relationship with BellSouth in 1997. In 1999, IPG Photonics established its first facility in Massachusetts to support its US telecom business. IPG’s world headquarters was moved to Massachusetts in 2000. (2)

Since Dr. Gapontsev founded IPG Photonics, it has shifted its focus from telecoms to developing fiber optic laser used in materials processing and manufacturing which is the core of the business today. Now part of the S&P 500 and listed on the NASDAQ exchange, IPG Photonics is valued at $13 billion. IPG Photonics employs more than 2,000 people in the US. IPG was responsible for exporting over $500 million worth of goods from the United States in 2017. (3)

Personal Life Dr. Gapontsev emigrated to the United States in 2001 and obtained a green card in 2003. He became a US citizen in 2008 and is now a dual US-Russian citizen. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife and family.

Scientific Field Dr. Gapontsev has over forty years of experience in the field of non-radiative energy transfer in rare earth ions and solid state materials. With this scientific background, he predicted an effective high power fiber laser when fiber lasers had output powers of several watts. In his 1990 paper he discussed the theoretical feasibility of a high power fiber laser with average output power of tens of watts, which would be a more reliable and cost-effective laser. (5)

Publications and Patents Dr. Gapontsev has written more than 200 published scientific papers. He holds more than 40 U.S. patents and more than 100 patents worldwide in the fields of laser glasses, laser design, pumping and components. (6) He is the author of two chapters on laser glasses in a text book of laser phosphate glasses. (7)

Awards Dr. Gapontsev is recipient of the following business, scientific, and national awards: • Optical Society of America, Fellow, 2011; (8) • SPIE, listed as one of 28 “Laser Luminaries,” 2010; (9) • Laser Institute of America, Arthur L. Schawlow award, 2009; (10) • Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Honorary Degree of Doctor of Engineering, 2001. (11)

Citations: (1) https://spie.org/membership/spie-professional-magazine/archives/july-2007/independent-thinker?SSO=1 (2) https://spie.org/membership/spie-professional-magazine/archives/july-2007/independent-thinker?SSO=1 (3) https://www.ipgphotonics.com/en/WhyIpg#[History] (4) https://spie.org/membership/spie-professional-magazine/archives/july-2007/independent-thinker?SSO=1 (5) V.P. Gapontsev and I.E. Samartsev, “High-Power Fiber Laser” in Summaries of Paper, Advanced Solid-State Lasers Topical Meeting, OSA, Washington, D.C. (1990), Paper TuB5-1. (6) https://www.pubfacts.com/author/Valentin+Gapontsev (7) Laser Phosphate Glasses. Alekseev, N. E.; Gapontsev, V. P.; Zhabotinskii, M. E.; Kravchenko, V. B.; Rudnitskii, Iu. P. Moscow, Izdatel'stvo Nauka, 1980. 352 p. (8) https://www.osa.org/en-us/awards_and_grants/fellow_members/recent_fellows/2012_fellows/ (9) https://spie.org/Documents/AboutSPIE/SPIE%20Laser%20Luminaries.pdf (10) https://www.lia.org/about-lia/awards-nominations/schawlow-award (11) https://cee.wpi.edu/news/20001/commence.html — Preceding unsigned comment added by Agormc (talk • contribs) 14:25, 20 August 2018 (UTC)

Short summary: all of the above appears to be true, however underweights his Soviet scientific career and the links unfortunately are mostly self-published. PaulT2022 (talk) 23:32, 15 July 2022 (UTC)