Through her role as EU Project Support Officer at B-PHOT, Debaes has facilitated photonics innovation through her support of various European projects, such as SMethods, Phablabs 4.0, Actphast 4.0 (and 4R) and PhotonHub Europe.
Before joining B-PHOT, Debaes worked in industry – first as an optical engineer at Barco Industries, where she worked on optical spectroscopy for food quality control. From 1999 until 2002 she was R&D Manager at Automation, a Belgian engineering company, where she was responsible for developing power supply control systems in telecom containers.
Debaes is CEO of the project EYEST (Youth for Engineering, Science and Technology), a Belgian nonprofit association that aims to engage school children in photonics. The project designs and distributes experimental kits, lessons and workshops, so that young people – aged 10 to 18 – can go beyond the theory and experiment with lasers and optics. So far, more than 3,400 Photonics Explorer kits have been distributed to European teachers, supporting hundreds of thousands of European students each year.
Organisation: B-PHOT Brussels Photonics, a self-supporting research and innovation institute of the Faculty of Engineering of Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB)
Role: EU Project Support Officer
Based in: Brussels, Belgium
Education: Electrical Engineering (major in photonics), Vrije Universiteit Brussel as Electrical Engineer