Education
Weldon won a scholarship (bursary) to the Bedford Modern School, which he attended until the age of 18, excelling in mathematics and the sciences before enrolling at to study Chemistry and Computer Science. He graduated with First Class honours in 1990, and was accepted to the Doctor of Philosophy program at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he studied Physical Chemistry and performed research into the growth of diamond films on metallic surfaces with Cynthia Friend. He was awarded the Nottingham Prize for his thesis work.
Career
He also serves as the Corporate Chief Technology Officer of Alcatel-Lucent. In 1995, he accepted a post doctoral position at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, working in the group of Yves Chabal, in the Physical Sciences research laboratory, headed by Horst Stormer. After the spin-out of Lucent Technologies from American Telephone & Telegraph Company, and the sale of the optical fiber business to Commscope, he changed focus to investigate early Fiber To The Home technologies and architectures.
This led to his subsequent appointment as Chief Technology Officer of the Broadband Solutions business unit of Lucent Technologies in 2004, and with one area of focus being broadband economics and quality of service.
After the merger between Alcatel Société Anonyme and Lucent Technologies in 2006, he became the Chief Technology Officer of the Broadband Access business unit of the combined entity, before becoming the Corporate Chief Technology Officer for Alcatel-Lucent in 2009. In 2013, after the departure of Jeong Kim, he became the 13th President of Bell Labs, in addition to his continued role as Chief Technology Officer of Alcatel-Lucent.
He has focused on the rejuvenation of Bell Labs and a return to its pre-eminence by the invention of foundational networking technologies and systems for the ‘cloud networking’ era, via 10x game-changing research and so-called ‘FutureX’ projects. In 2014 under his tenure the Bell Labs Prize was inaugurated. to encourage external innovators to collaborate with Bell Labs’ researchers.
Weldon was named as one of Global Telecoms Business Power 100 in 2014, and one of Global Telecoms Business 50 CTOs to watch in 2015.
Membership
He was offered a position as a Member of Technical Staff in the Materials Research laboratory run by Alastair Glass, working for Mark Cardillo to study the microscopic physics and chemistry of sol-gel.