Board of Directors

Dr. Michael Lebby has served as our Chief Executive Officer since May 1, 2017 and as a director of our Company since August 26, 2015. He also previously served a Member of our Operations Committee until April 30, 2017. Dr. Lebby is in charge of the overall general management of the Company and supervision of Company policies, setting the Company’s strategies, formulating and overseeing the Company’s business plan, raising capital, expanding the Company’s management team and the general promotion of the Company From June 2013 to 2015, Dr. Lebby has served as President and CEO of OneChip Photonics, Inc., a privately held company headquartered in Ottawa, Canada, that is a leading provider of low-cost, small-footprint, high-performance indium phosphide (InP)-based photonic integrated circuits (PICs) and PIC-based optical sub-assemblies (OSAs) for the Data Center markets. Also, from 2013 to 2015 Dr. Lebby presently served as part-time full professor, and chair of optoelectronics at Glyndwr University in Wales, UK, to bring forward advanced materials, device, and integrated photonics based technologies for the datacenter and high performance computing markets. During the period 2014 to 2016, Dr. Lebby focused on a foundry based model for InP-based photonic integrated circuits (PICs) and optoelectronic integrated circuits (OEICs) in the datacenter segment and was been instrumental in assembling California’s proposal (via USC) to the Federal Government for an integrated photonics manufacturing institute. Dr. Lebby holds a Doctor of Engineering, a Ph.D., a MBA and a bachelor’s degree, all from the University of Bradford, United Kingdom. Dr. Lebby has well over 200 issued utility patents with the USPTO. This number expands to over 450 if international derivative patents are included.

Mr. Marcelli has serves as Lightwave Logic, Inc., President and Chief Operating Officer, and he was named our Secretary in March 2018. Previously, from August 2008 to April 2012, Mr. Marcelli served as Lightwave’s President and Chief Executive Officer. Mr. Marcelli is in charge of the day-to-day operations of Lightwave, and also serves as its principal financial officer. Over the last thirty five years, he has served as the president and chief executive officer of multiple start-up and growth companies in high tech manufacturing and business services, including two companies that were founded by him. In addition, he has held senior management positions with several companies including Teradyne Corporation and Sanmina Corporation. Throughout his career, he has held positions in Engineering, Sales, Marketing, Operations and Finance. Mr. Marcelli served as a mentor for the National Science Foundation, NFS Innovation Program. Mr. Marcelli has served on the boards of several non-profit corporations and also served on the Advisory Board of the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs Engineering School.

Mr. Bucchi joined the Lightwave Logic Board in June 2012, and he currently serves as the Chairperson of our Audit Committee, Lead Director Financial Expert, and a Member of the Nominating & Corporate Governance Committee. Mr. Bucchi is currently a self employed C.P.A. with a specialized practice that concentrates in CEO consulting, strategic planning, mergers, acquisitions, business sales and tax. He works with domestic and international companies. Mr. Bucchi is currently a Member of the Board of Directors of First Connecticut Bancorp, Inc., serving on Asset Liability Committee, the Governance and Loan committees in addition to chairing the Audit committee. He is currently the Treasurer and a Member of the Board of Directors of the Petit Family Foundation, Inc. He has served on numerous other community boards and is past Chairman of the Wheeler Clinic and the Wheeler YMCA. He is a Member of the Connecticut Society of Certified Public Accountants, American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and the National Association of Corporate Directors. Mr. Bucchi is a graduate of the Harvard Business School Executive Education program with completed course studies in general board governance, audit and compensation and a graduate of Central Connecticut State University where he received his B.S. in Accounting.

Mr. Siraj Nour El-Ahmadi joined the Lightwave Logic Board in October 2013 and currently serves as Chairperson of the Compensation Committee, a Member of the Operations Committee, a Member of the Audit Committee, and a Member of the Nominating and Governance Committee. Since 2004, Mr. El-Ahmadi has served as Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer of Menara Networks, a developer of innovative products and solutions that simplify layered optical transport networks. Mr. El-Ahmadi has over 17 years of experience in optical transmission in particular and the telecom industry in general. Prior to founding Menara, Mr. El-Ahmadi served as Vice President-Marketing & Product Management at Nortel where he was responsible for the OPTera LH 4000 ULR product (acquired from Qtera) that achieved over $200M in revenues in its first two years. Prior to that, Mr. El-Ahmadi was the Product Architect & Vice President of Product Management at Qtera Corporation, a successful technology start-up acquired by Nortel in 2000 for $3.25 billion. Mr. El-Ahmadi also held a Senior Manager position at Bell Northern Research and worked as a Transmission Engineer at WilTel (WorldCom) where he evaluated and deployed the world first bidirectional EDFA and bi-directional WDM transmission. Mr. El-Ahmadi holds a BS and MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Oklahoma, is a Member of Eta Kappa Nu and is the inventor of 11 patents, issued or pending, in the area of optical communications. He has authored a number of publications and is a frequent speaker at telecom and optical networking events and conferences.

Dr. Frederick J. Leonberger joined the Lightwave Logic Board on April 1, 2017, and he currently serves as the Chairperson of our Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee, Member of the Compensation Committee, and Member of the Operations Committee. Since 2010, Dr. Leonberger has served as the Principal of EOvation Advisors LLC, a private technology and business advisory firm and presently serves as a board Member for various private photonics companies. Dr. Leonberger is a widely known technologist and industry leader in the field of photonics and fiber optics. For nearly 40 years he has been a leading contributor to the development of a variety of important optical devices, company leadership, product and business strategy, and commercialization. The integrated optical modulator technology he and his colleagues pioneered has been used pervasively for over 20 years to encode data at multi-Gb/s rates in long-haul fiber optic networks (the Internet “superhighways”). He previously served as senior vice president and chief technology officer of JDS Uniphase Corporation (JDSU, now Lumentum), a leading optical components company, from 1995 until his retirement in 2003, where he played a lead role in technology strategy, mergers and acquisitions and intellectual property activities. Prior to JDSU, he was co-founder and general manager of United Technologies Photonics (UTP), a high-speed optical modulator company, and held research management positions at United Technologies Research Center (UTRC) and MIT Lincoln Laboratory. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the recipient of several industry awards.

Dr. Craig Ciesla joined Lightwave Logic Board on January 18, 2022, and currently serves on the Compensation Committee and Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee. Dr. Ciesla is currently the Vice President, Head of the Advanced Platforms and Devices Group at Illumina, a leading provider of DNA sequencing and array technologies. There he leads a team driving innovation in sequencing platforms, microfluidics, electronics, and nanofabrication. Prior to Illumina, he was Vice President of Engineering at Kaiam, where he was responsible for the development and production of 100G transceivers for the data-center market. He was also the founding CEO of Tactus Technology, an innovator in the user interface industry, where he was the co-inventor of Tactus’ polymer morphing screen technology. Before Tactus he had a variety of roles at Intel, JDSU (now Lumentum), Bookham (now Oclaro) and Ignis Optics developing a wide range of products in the fiber-optics market. He started his career at Toshiba Research Europe, where he performed early terahertz images of skin cancer. Dr. Ciesla holds a BSc (Hons.) in Applied Physics and Ph.D. in Physics from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh.