Prof. Donna Strickland
Donna Strickland received her B. Eng. from McMaster
University and her PhD from the University of
Rochester. Along with her PhD supervisor, Dr. Gerard
Mourou, Donna Strickland co-invented Chirped Pulse
Amplification. Dr. Strickland was a research associate
at the National Research Council of Canada, a physicist
at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a
member of technical staff at Princeton University. Dr.
Strickland joined the physics department of the
University of Waterloo in 1997. At Waterloo, Dr.
Strickland's ultrafast laser group develops highintensity laser systems for nonlinear optics
investigations. She is a recipient of a Sloan Research
Fellowship, a Premier’s Research Excellence Award, a
Cottrell Scholars Award and is a Fellow of the Optical
Society of America. She served as the 2013 OSA
president.
Associate professor & rookie entrepreneur,
Prof. Boudoux obtained her PhD from the
Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology
program (USA). She then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Ecole Polytechnique
(France) before starting her laboratory, in
2007, at Ecole Polytechnique Montreal
(Canada). Her research topics range from lasertissue interactions to novel hardware for
imaging. With a colleague and strategic
investors, she later founded Castor Optics, a
spin-off company commercializing a new line
of double-clad fibers couplers.
Yanina Shevchenko completed her MSc and
PhD at Carleton University, Ottawa. While
specializing in biophotonics and plasmonic
fiber biosensors as a graduate student, Yanina
pursued other, adjacent with photonics
research areas later in her career. In particular,
she worked and published on a number of
projects revolving around complexity, new
biologically and mathematically-inspired
robotics and tissue engineering while
Biography Prof. Sophie LaRochelle
Professor Sophie LaRochelle received a Bachelor's degree in
engineering physics from Université Laval, Canada, in 1987; and a
Ph.D. degree in optics from the College of Optical Sciences, University
of Arizona, USA, in 1992 under the supervision of Prof. George
Stegeman. From 1992 to 1996, she was a Research Scientist at the
Defense Research and Development Canada - Valcartier, where she
worked on electro-optical systems. She is now a professor at the
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Université Laval,
where she holds a Canada Research Chair (tier 1) in Advanced
Photonics Technologies for Communications. She is a renowned expert
in fiber optics components and communications with more than 150
papers published in refereed journals, almost exclusively in IEEE or
OSA journals, and more than 200 papers in international conference
proceedings. Her work has been highly cited, receiving more than
4300 citations according to Google scholar (h-index=34, i10index=110). She is the co-author of eight patents (three licenced to
the industry). She has served on the advisory or technical committees
of many organizations. In career, she has directed the work of more
than 60 graduate students and post-doctoral fellows and has led
several industry-sponsored projects. Professor LaRochelle is an OSA
Fellow.
Dr. Dan-Xia Xu is a Principal Research Officer with NRC, an adjunct
professor with Carleton University, and a Fellow of OSA. She received
her Ph.D. from Linköping University (Sweden) working on SiGe
transistors and tunneling diodes. Since joining NRC, she has developed
high speed SiGe HBTs and photodetectors, and pioneered the use of
nickel silicide for deep sub-micron VLSI. She later switched her
research to integrated optics. In 2001-2002 she was part of the
research team at Optenia Inc. that successfully developed the first
commercial glass waveguide echelle grating demultiplexer. Since 2003,
she has led the pioneering work in cladding stress engineering for
polarization control of photonic components, and in high sensitivity
silicon photonic waveguide sensor systems. She has served on the
technical committees of many conferences, as a chair or a committee
member. Her current research interest is silicon photonics and
photonic integration for optical communications and biological
sensing. She has co-authored over 350 publications, several book
chapters, and holds seven patents.