George Papen joins the UCSD faculty in September 2002 from a full professorship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He arrived at UIUC in 1989 after earning his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Wisconsin. He has been actively involved in professional associations, and chaired recent conferences including the OSA Optical Remote Sensing Conference and High Speed Interconnects within Digital Systems conference, both in 2001. He is a co-holder of three patents.