Dr Yuta Wakayama named Honorary Senior Research Fellow at UCL
Dr Yuta Wakayama, Senior Manager & Head of Photonic Transport Network Laboratory at KDDI Research, has been named Honorary Senior Research Fellow at UCL. Dr Wakayama spent 12 months at UCL in 2018 as an academic visitor, which started a successful and long term collaboration between the Optical Networks Group at UCL and the KDDI Research Labs. This collaboration has been invaluable to TRANSNET, which has benefitted from equipment loans from KDDI in addition to joint modelling and experiments, resulting in several high-profile & record results papers. Such results include a record-breaking 16.4 THz transmission bandwidth over 80km of unrepeated single-mode fibre, the highest ever for a single amplifier setup.
Since his time at UCL, Dr Wakayama has become a world-leading researcher in high-capacity optical fibre communications systems. In addition to leading a large team at KDDI, Dr Wakayama serves as the Subcommittee Chair of Transmission System at Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC) 2026, and has been a Technical Program Committee member at OFC from 2023 to 2025. He has also held the position of Japan delegate for ITU-T SG15 since April 2021. Dr Wakayama's honorary position is equally beneficial for TRANSNET and UCL; his work in high-capacity and high-efficient optical fibre communication systems for AI data centres is an area of research focus for numerous UCL groups. Dr Wakayama’s expertise is invaluable to our team when seeking guidance in our research directions, and we welcome the opportunity to further strengthen our relationship with KDDI to bridge UK-Japan research communities.
We are so proud to have hosted Dr Wakayama during his time as a visiting researcher and it is a great pleasure to continue working with him as his career progresses. We look forward to many more collaborations in the future, and you can read some previous TRANSNET publications with contributions from Dr Wakayama below.