A colorless tunable optical dispersion compensator (TODC) comprising a silica arrayed-waveguide grating (AWG) directly coupled to a polymer thermo-optic lens. As a result of its inventive construction, the device exhibits low loss, large tuning range, low electrical consumption and is readily manufactured using standard processes. Additionally, the TODC is fully solid-state and scales to a large figure-of-merit (dispersion range times bandwidth squared).