Joe LaChapelle is Vice President of Research and Development at Luminar, responsible for the development and creation of the next generation technologies for Luminar’s autonomous vehicle perception systems. Throughout his career, Joe has held leadership positions in photonics companies ranging from executive management, engineering management and R&D. He has co-founded multiple startups related to the development and sale of LiDAR, lasers and detector technologies. In the early 2000’s, he co-founded Deep Photonics and served as CEO for five years. LaChapelle holds more than 30 U.S. and international patents in optics technologies and earned a B.S. degree in Engineering Physics from Oregon State University.