Richard Vincent Penty, FREng (born 9 September 1964) is a British engineer and academic.
[1] He is the oldest of three sons of two Uttoxeter medical practitioners, Peter and Patricia Janet (née Shelbourne) Penty.
[2] He remained at Cambridge to undertake postgraduate study in engineering, specialising in nonlinear optical fibre devices.
[3] In 1989, he entered his doctoral thesis titled "Novel optical fibre Kerr devices for signal processing".
[1][5] In 2001, he moved from Bristol to the University of Cambridge as Professor of Photonics in its Department of Engineering.
This included working on the Ethernet standards and is now concentrating on advanced modulation format approaches to realising 100 Gbit/s photonic links using a single optical source.
He was involved in the realisation of a 16x16 photonic switch which had the time had the largest number of active components integrated together on a single chip.