Twenty-six of this year’s Photonics100 nominees are women, in roles ranging from PhD candidates to CEOs. While this ratio can be read as encouraging when compared with the proportion of women who responded to SPIE’s 2022 salary survey (21%), it is certainly a figure we hope to see increase in future editions of the list.
Sure to help are initiatives such as Gabriella Gardosi’s WEST (Women in Engineering, Science and Technology) at Aston University, Ursula Keller’s work at ETH Zurich and the examples set in the C-suites of both established photonics companies (by executives such as Coherent’s Julie Eng and Edmund Optics’ Marisa Edmund) and in start-ups (such as Quantopticon’s Mirella Koleva, and Nu Quantum’s Carmen Palacios-Berraquero).
