Women in Photonics Panel and Luncheon
Wednesday, 25th September 2024 – 12:30 – 14:00
Empowerment Bridge: Taking Cognizance from Leading Ladies in Photonics and Optics
Join us for a special event that honors and celebrates professional women in the dynamic fields of optics and photonics. Discover the remarkable achievements and innovative ideas of female mentors and role models, and seize the chance to network with fellow participants and potential mentors.
Engage in a thought-provoking panel discussion featuring distinguished speakers from academia and industry. They will share their insights and visions on promoting fairness in the workplace, discuss the challenges they’ve overcome, and reveal invaluable lessons from their journeys. This event is your opportunity to be inspired and to foster mentorship opportunities that drive gender diversity within the photonics and optics industry.
After the panel, enjoy a networking lunch designed to facilitate meaningful connections and the exchange of ideas. The lunch is sponsored by OPTICA.
Don’t miss out on this inclusive and empowering experience. Register your interest when you sign up for ECOC online. This event is open to all registered attendees of ECOC.
Panel Members
- Camille-Sophie Bres, Physicist and Professor at EPFL Switzerland
- Myriam Recha, Consulting Account Lead at Google
- Claudia Hoessbacher, CEO Polariton
- Julie Eng, Coherent Corp.
Organizers
- Anna Lena Schall-Giesecke, Fraunhofer IMS and University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
- Elena Noeke, 1&1 Versatel Düsseldorf, Germany
- Anjali Sharma, University of the Bundeswehr Munich, Germany
Camille-Sophie BRÈS
Camille-Sophie Brès is an associate professor at EPFL in the institute of Electrical Engineering. She received her bachelor degree with honors in electrical engineering from McGill University, Canada, in 2002. She obtained her PhD in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 2006. After a post-doctoral position at the University of California San Diego, she joined EPFL in 2011 as a tenure track professor and director of the Photonic Systems Laboratory. She and her team specialize on the design, simulation and demonstration of optical waveguides and devices for enhancing and controlling nonlinear processes aimed at light generation, signal processing, or sensing. She was awarded the early career Women in Photonics Award from the European Optical Society in 2016, as well as ERC starting (2012), Consolidator (2017) and Proof of Concept (2019) grants. She is active as part as technical program committees for various international conferences and is an OPTICA fellow.
Myriam RECHA
Myriam Recha is Consulting Account Lead at Google Cloud, helping customers in the telecommunications industry successfully adopt Google Cloud’s products and services, enabling their IT and Network cloud transformation.
Prior to joining Google, Myriam held technology leadership and sales roles in Mavenir, Vodafone, Alcatel and Jazztel. Myriam has 25 years of international experience in the telecommunications industry, with expertise in network engineering, cloud, organizational transformation, and business development.
After a long career in technology organizations, with her last role at Vodafone as Director Local Design, leading the fixed access and TV engineering teams in Germany as well as the Vodafone Innovation Park, Myriam pivoted to sales roles at Mavenir and later Google, where she continues to operate in her sweet spot – the intersection between technology and business.
Myriam holds a degree in Telecommunications Engineering from Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and currently lives in Düsseldorf, Germany.
Julie ENG
Julie Sheridan Eng was named Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Coherent in 2022. Prior to becoming CTO, Dr. Eng served as Senior Vice President and General Manager of Coherent/II-VI’s Optoelectronic Devices and Modules Business Unit. Prior to joining II-VI through the II-VI acquisition of Finisar, Dr. Eng worked at Finisar, serving most recently as Executive Vice President and General Manager of Finisar’s 3D Sensing Business Unit, and prior to that, as Executive Vice President of Datacom Engineering. Prior to joining Finisar, Dr. Eng was part of AT&T/Lucent/Agere, where she managed datacom transceivers.
Dr. Eng is a Past Chair of the IEEE Committee on Women in Engineering and presently serves on the Board of Directors of Optica (formerly the Optical Society of America). She holds a B.A. degree in Physics from Bryn Mawr College and a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). She earned M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. In 2022, she was elected Fellow of Optica for distinguished contributions to the advancement of optics and photonics.
Claudia HOESSBACHER
Claudia’s interest in light was stimulated during her B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering at KIT, Germany, and further nurtured by her Master’s in Optics and Photonics. This fascination led her to delve into photonic integrated circuits (PICs), plasmonics, and electro-optics for her PhD at ETH Zurich. Her cutting-edge research earned her the ETH Pioneer Fellowship in 2019, enabling her to co-found Polariton, a company aimed at providing the world’s fastest, smallest, and most energy-efficient PICs to address the future of connectivity.
Moderator
Michela Svaluto
Michela Svaluto Moreolo is Research Director and the Coordinator of the “Photonic and Quantum Communication Technologies” research line within the Packet Optical Networks and Services research unit at the Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (CTTC), Spain. She is also a member of the CTTC Management Team, with the role of Director of Quality Programs. Her Institutional responsibilities include the Human Resources Strategy for Researchers (HRS4R) and the Gender Equality Plan. In her role of mentor, she supervised various PhD and MSc/BSc students, as well as PostDoc and visiting researchers. She has been actively involved in several R&D projects and she has co-authored over 200 scientific publications. She serves as Associate Editor for the Journal of Optical Communications and Networking. She has organized different scientific events and serves as TPC member of the most relevant international conferences in the field of optical communications and photonics (e.g., ECOC, OFC, SPIE Photonics West, OECC/PSC, Optica APC). Dr. Svaluto Moreolo is an IEEE Senior Member.
Sponsor
