Max Mellette is a postdoctoral researcher in the CSE department at UC San Diego working with George Porter on data center network architecture. He received his Ph.D. in Photonics from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at UC San Diego, where he worked on optical switching hardware advised by Joseph Ford. Before that, he received a Bachelor in Engineering Physics, also from UC San Diego. Max's research focuses on using optical switching to improve the scalability, power consumption, and cost of data center networks. This involves working at the physical layer to design and build novel optical switches up through the transport layer to design high-performance network architectures compatible with those switches. (#33423)