Alphonse received a BSEE (1958) and MSEE (1959) from New York University, and a PhD in Electrophysics from Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute in 1967.
[2] As documented in the book by Alexander Magoun, Alphonse spent much of his career at the RCA Labs later to become spun off as the Sarnoff Institute.
The device is a broadband semiconductor light source and key component of next-generation fiber optic gyroscopes, low coherence tomography for medical imaging, and external cavity tunable lasers with applications to fiber optic communications.
[4] Alphonse was the 2005 president of the United States division of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).
[5] He holds more than 50 U.S. patents,[6] was inducted into the New Jersey Inventors' Hall of Fame in 2005,[7] and in 2016 was honored with the Marcus Garvey Lifetime Achievement Award by the Institute for Caribbean Studies in Washington, D.C.[8] His daughter is the journalist Lylah M.