Keynote Speakers

Speakers will be added as confirmed.

Ulrike Fuchs, Fraunhofer IOF, Asphericon, Germany
Title: High precision optics in Life Science Applications
Ulrike Fuchs is Vice President for Strategy & Innovation at asphericon and oversees all R&D activities as well as strategic product development. After joining asphericon in 2010, Fuchs focused on linking the manufacturing of aspherics and metrology with questions in optical design. With her team, she also develops concepts to improve prediction of system performance during optical design and tolerancing. Most recently, Fuchs has emphasized transferring those ideas to freeform optics. In 2018, Fuchs was the inaugural winner of the Kevin P. Thompson Optical Design Innovator Award of Optica. She has authored and co-authored more than 70 publications and has registered six patent families. During the past 15 years, Fuchs has supervised more than 20 B.S. and M.S. theses in the field of optics. Also, she has been working as an Associate Editor for Optics Express since April 2018, and was elected a Fellow of Optica in 2020.

Antoine Godard, ONERA, Université Paris-Saclay, 91120 Palaiseau, France
Antoine Godard received the Engineering degree from Institut d’Optique Graduate School, Orsay, France, in 1998, and the PhD degree in 2003 and the Habilitation (HDR) in 2016, both from Université Paris-Saclay. He joined ONERA, the French national aerospace research centre, as a research scientist in 2003. His research involves laser applications and nonlinear optics with a special interest in optical parametric oscillators and their applications to atmospheric sensing. His interests also cover more basic research topics with the investigation of photon correlations by two-photon absorption in semiconductors. He has authored over 65 articles in peer-reviewed international journal and over 220 communications at international conferences (34 invited) and hold two patents. He has been involved in various research projects and studies for the European commission, the French and European space (CNES and ESA) and defence (DGA and EDA) agencies, the French National Research Agency (ANR) as well as direct contracts with industry. Since 2022, Godard has been the Scientific Director of Physics Domain of ONERA. As which, he has been in charge of the guidance of the research activities of three research departments (530 persons in total): Electromagnetism and radar; Optics and associated techniques; Physics, instrumentation, environment, and space. Godard is also the president-elect of the French Optical Society (SFO, 2024-2026).

Ming-Jun Li, Corning Inc, USA
Dr. Ming-Jun Li joined Corning Incorporated in 1991 and is currently a Corporate Fellow. He has contributed to many single mode and multimode fiber products for optical communications and specialty fibers for different applications. He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of Optica and IEEE. He was inducted into the US National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2022. He received the 1988 French National Prize on Guidedwave Optics, Corning’s 2005 Stookey Award, and 2023 John Tyndall Award. He was a member of teams who won 1999 R&D 100 Award for LEAF® fiber, 2008 R&D 100 Award for ClearCurve® fiber, 2008 ACS Northeast Regional Industrial Innovation Award, Corning’s 2016 Outstanding External Publication Award, and 2017 ACS Heroes of Chemistry Award. He has served as Associate Editor, Coordinating Committee Member, and Deputy Editor for the Journal of Lightwave Technology.  He has also served as a guest editor for several journal special issues and as committee chair or member for many international conferences.  He holds 305 US patents and has published 7 book chapters and over 370 technical papers.

David Richardson, Microsoft, UK
David Richardson is an experienced research leader and engineer and a well-known figure in the international photonics community. David started his career working in fundamental physics, receiving his PhD from Sussex University, UK, in 1989, before joining the Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) at the University of Southampton where he went on to spend more than three decades undertaking research on optical fiber technology and its applications – the final two decades as Deputy Director. He worked on numerous topics whilst in academia, but is particularly recognized for his contributions in the areas of fiber lasers, optical fiber communications and hollow core fiber technology. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, Royal Academy of Engineering, and Optica, and has received various prestigious awards for his achievements, most recently the IEEE/Optica 2024 John Tyndall Award and the 2025 IEEE Photonics Award. David has also enjoyed considerable success as an entrepreneur, co-founding two spin out companies: SPI Lasers Ltd in 2000 (high power fiber lasers for industrial applications – which was acquired by Trumpf in 2008), and more recently Lumenisity Ltd in 2017 (hollow-core fiber cables for telecommunications), serving as CTO and Board Member up until its acquisition by Microsoft in Dec 2022. He joined Microsoft full time as a Partner Researcher early in 2023 to further his long-held ambition to develop new and empowering hollow-core fiber based network solutions and to deploy them at scale.