Invited Speakers

Lisa Bardou, DLR, Germany (Active and Adaptive Optics)
Tom Charrett, Cranfield University (Advances in Optical Metrology and Measurements)
Alessandro Fedrizzi, Heriot-Watt University (Quantum Networking)
Kate Fenwick, University of Ottawa (Integrated photonics & photonic systems)
Charalambos Louca, University of Cambridge, UK (Ultrafast and Strong Light-Matter Interactions)
Aurora Maccarone, Heriot-Watt University, UK (Quantum Metrology, Imaging, and Sensing)

Lisa Bardou

Lisa started her career as an adaptive optics scientist, studying laser guide stars for her PhD at observatoire de Paris. She then moved to Durham University as a post-doctoral researcher working on developing adaptive optics systems for the extremely large telescope. Nowadays, she works in Germany and still develops adaptive optics systems, but now in the context of free space optical communication.

Title: Adaptive Optics for free space optical communication at the German Aerospace Centre

Kate Fenwick

Kate is a Research Associate, holding a Luise and Gerhard Herzberg Fellowship, in the Ultrafast Quantum Photonics group at the National Research Council of Canada (NRC). She completed her PhD studies in physics at the University of Ottawa, where she held a Vanier Scholarship. Prior to her PhD, she completed her BSc and MSc at Queen's University, also in physics. Kate's primary research interests lie in the field of ultrafast quantum photonic technologies, with a focus on ultrafast photonic quantum information processing.

Title: All-optical quantum information processing in the ultrafast regime

Charalambos Louca

Charalambos Louca is a physicist working at the frontier of atomically thin materials, polariton physics, and ultrafast nanophotonics. As a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge, he studies and engineers strong nonlinear optical behaviour in low-dimensional semiconductors, hybrid light–matter quasiparticles, and plasmonic systems. His work has delivered advances in enhanced dipolar exciton–polariton nonlinearities and femtosecond switching in microcavities based on two-dimensional semiconductors. With research experience in Sheffield, Milan, and Cambridge, he is developing novel nanostructures for next-generation ultralow-energy optical technologies.

Title: Low-Dimensional Light–Matter States for Ultrafast Switching and Nanoscale Nonlinear Optics