David Rolston

Dr. David Rolston graduated from McGill University with a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 2000 in the area of Photonic Systems. In 2000, he worked for FCI-Areva (now part of Amphenol) as a research scientist for their Corporate Research center. At the end of 2001, he co-founded Reflex Photonics in Montreal, Canada. He played many roles from CTO to designer to salesman to finding Investment capital and successfully grew the company where they were eventually acquired by Smiths Interconnect – a UK based multinational in 2019. Reflex was roughly 60 people with class 10000 clean rooms doing assembly and manufacturing and chip-scale packaging for low-cost, high-performance parallel optical transceiver modules for high-reliability markets such as aerospace, avionics, military and industrial markets.

Dr. Rolston has over 25 years of technology and business development. He has interacted with investors, generating customer leads through direct sales interactions along with project proposals to companies such as Cisco, IBM, Infinera, Raytheon, Harris, and many others. Dr. Rolston has also worked with numerous universities in Canada and the US on projects related to many optical and industrial technologies under NSERC or DARPA contracts and has written and drafted numerous patent applications.

Photo: David Rolston and Researcher, Daniel Musat, 2023