Emmanuel Desurvire has been involved in the field of optical fiber communications for over twenty years, starting from his PhD work on Raman fiber amplifiers in 1981-83 at Thomson-CSF (now Thales) with the University of Nice (France). He then took a Post-doc position at Stanford University where he demonstrated the first optically-amplified recirculating loop. In 1986, he joined AT&T Bell Laboratories, where he initiated and led he early research program on EDFAs. He left for Columbia University in 1990, to become Associate Professor. Since 1994 he has been with Alcatel, first leading a research group on transoceanic transmission and all-optical in-line regeneration for submarine systems. He then managed the pre-development of 40Gbit/s WDM systems, involving beams from Italy, Germany and France. In 1998, he obtained from the University of Nice the title of Sc.D for his work on EDFA. Since 2000, he was appointed in the Corporate CTO staff as Director of the Alcatel Technical Academy. After a second reference book on EDFAs (co-authored with three Alcatel contributors), he is now finishing a comprehensive entry-level reference guide on global telecom technologies. E. Desurvire, who has authored or co-authored over 200 technical publications and 30 patents, is IEEE Fellow. For his contributions to the investigation and development of EDFAs, he received several national and international awards. The latter includes the 1994 prize from the International Commission for Optics, and the 1998 Benjamin Franklin Medal in engineering.