Andrew R. Chraplyvy received the B.S. degree in physics in 1972 from Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in physics from Cornell University in 1975 and 1977, respectively. He joined the physics department at General Motors Research Labs in 1977 as a Senior Research Scientist. At GM he worked on ultra-high resolution spectroscopy of gases and impurity modes in solids. Since 1980, he has been with Bell Laboratories, where he currently is Vice President, Optical Transport Networks Research. Dr. Chraplyvy holds over 30 patents in the areas of lightwave systems and fiber optics.

He is the recipient of the 2003 John Tyndall Award, the 1999 Thomas Alva Edison Patent Award, the 1999 New Jersey Inventor of the Year Award, and the 1998 Lucent Technologies Patent Award. He is a Bell Labs Fellow, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, Fellow of the Optical Society of America and Fellow of IEEE. His areas of interest are fiber optics, lightwave communications systems, nonlinear optical interactions in fibers, fiber networks, and nonlinear optics and spectroscopy. Chraplyvy and Robert Tkach were named Marconi Fellows in 2009 for their research into optical fiber nonlinearities and their development of novel mitigation techniques that vastly increased the transmission speed and capacity of optical fiber communications systems.