Dr. Francesco Testa is Principal Researcher at Ericsson Research in Pisa. He received the Engineering degree , summa cum laude, from the University of Rome in 1980. In 1982 he received a scholarship from Fondazione Ugo Bordoni in Rome, for researching on integrated optics.  He started working in 1985 at Alcatel-Face Italy on the research of coherent optical systems. He joined Ericsson in Rome  in 1991, where he worked on the first demonstrations of WDM transport  systems in the framework of the European projects RACE and ACTS. He was later involved in the hardware design and development of transmission and switching equipments for SDH, DECT, Local Multipoint Distribution System (LMDS),  GSM and Access networks products. He is currently engaged in the research on optical systems and photonic integrated technologies for 5G and data center networks. He has co-authored many papers in the field of optical communications and he was invited speaker at ECOC 2015 conference in Valencia and at the SPIE Conference on Silicon Photonics and Photonic Integrated Circuits in Brussels in 2012. He holds more than 40 patents. He is the technical coordinator of the IRIS project in the FP7 European Union Framework Program. He has co-authored a chapter of the book Silicon Photonics III edited by Lorenzo Pavesi and David Lockwood, Topics in Applied Physics vol 122 (Springer-Verlag, 2016).