About Gerald Butters

Gerald Butters is an acknowledged dignitary in the communications industry. His career spanning more than 40 years, included appointments as president of NTI (Nortel’s US Subsidiary), chairman of the board of AGCS ( a joint manufacturing venture of AT&T and GTE), president of AT&T’s Network Systems Global Public Networks Development and Manufacturing divisions, president of Lucent Technologies North American marketing, sales
and services units. While at Lucent, he formed the Optical Networking Group and became its first president.

Butters influential thought leadership on Optical Technologies has been recognized in journals and Wikipedia as “Butters’ Law of Photonics”. Butters is also a co-founder of a scientific and philosophical group, which is attempting to understand and predict, undiscovered intersections of Optical and Computational science. Butters retired from Lucent in 2000 as senior vice president marketing and technology. He continues active industry involvement as a limited partner in Venture Capital firms, board membership in private and public companies and as a technical advisor. Extensive reference information about Butters can be found at the ZoomInfo (zoominfo.com) website.

Butters is a co-founder of Double Black Diamond Partners.

Butters is a Fellow of the prestigious International Engineering Consortium, and has lectured at Universities in Asia, Europe and North America. He has given Commencement addresses to graduating classes of Vanderbilt University, North Carolina State University and American Sentinel University. He was awarded the Mississippi University for Women gold medal for helping to bring distance learning to rural Mississippi high schools.

Butters served on the Board of Trustees-Fisk University, Board of Directors of ANS {a not for profit corporation} formed by IBM, MCI and the University of Michigan,which provided the high capacity backbone for the original Internet. Also, Boards of the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, Junior Achievement of Peel County, Junior Achievement of New York City, Rider University Business School, the AT&T Foundation, and Advisor to American Sentinel University,
Internet2, the US Department of Energy, and the National Science Foundation initiative on advanced Sciences for American Universities.