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Ursula Keller |
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Ursula Keller |
Ursula Keller is a newly elected member of the LEOS Board of Governors. She is a full professor of physics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland.
Ursula was born in Switzerland on June 21, 1959. She grew up in Zug, Switzerland, about 30 km south of Zurich. She graduated from the ETH in 1984 with a diploma degree (similar to a masters) in physics. From late 1984 to 1985 she worked on optical bistability at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland. She then moved to Stanford University, Stanford, CA and earned her M.S. and Ph.D. degree in Applied Physics in 1987 and 1989, respectively. Ursi performed her doctoral thesis under the supervision of Prof. Dave Bloom, investigating optical charge and voltage probing of GaAs integrated circuits. For her first year at Stanford she held a Fulbright Fellowship and for the following year she was an IBM Predoctoral Fellow. She very much enjoyed her time at the Ginzton Lab where she developed many good friendships. She was also encouraged by Dave Bloom, Bob Byer, Steve Harris, Geraldine Kenney Wallace (visiting professor from Toronto) and many others to give her best and excel beyond her own expectations. Looking back, she sees this experience as a key event in her achievements since then. She was also fortunate that Dave Auston (at that time still at Bell Labs) made it possible for her to become a summer student at Bell Labs in 1996. This was also a perfect excuse to drive across the U.S. (twice) in an old station wagon (which of course also broke down at least twice . . . )
In 1989, she became a Member of Technical Staff (MTS) at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Holmdel in New Jersey. Having had a great Bell Labs experience as a summer student, this was basically her dream job. It also put her right in the midst of the challenges for dual-career couples, as she and her new spouse decided to maintain a bi-coastal marriage. Living apart had the advantage that there was plenty of time for research, and also gave many adventurous rendezvous around the USA and the world. At Bell Labs, Ursi conducted research on photonic switching, ultrafast laser systems, and semiconductor spectroscopy. During this time she also started her work on semiconductor saturable absorber mirrors (SESAMs) to passively modelock solid-state lasers. Previous attempts to passively mode-lock diode-pumped solid-state lasers resulted in Q-switching instabilities which at best produced stable mode-locked pulses within longer Q-switched macropulses (i.e. Q-switched mode locking). The SESAM device was a breakthrough resulting in the first demonstration in 1992 of self-starting and stable passive mode locking of diode-pumped solid-state lasers with an intracavity saturable absorber.
In March 1993 she was appointed an Associate Professor and in October 1997 she became a Full Professor in the Physics Department at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich, Switzerland. Her current research interests are in ultrafast lasers, attosecond science, spectroscopy, local probes and novel devices for applications in optical information processing, communication and medicine. Together with her research team at ETH she has continued to push the frontiers in passively modelocked and Q-switched solid-state lasers in terms of pulse duration (demonstrated shortest pulses directly from a laser oscillator and demonstrated shortest pulses from a Q-switched solid-state laser), average output power (27 W picosecond and 16 W femtosecond diode-pumped solid-solid state lasers), pulse repetition rates (up to about 60 GHz passively modelocked Nd:YVO4 lasers). Key for this success was a systematic research effort to understand the underlying physics and scaling issues.
She currently supervises about 20 postdoctoral and graduate researchers. To date she has graduated eight graduate students and 14 Diploma (Masters) students. Two of her senior researchers finished their “Habilitation degree,” resulting in a full professor position at the University of Karlsruhe and a staff research position at the PTB in Braunschweig. She has published more than 130 journal papers and 4 book chapters and she is inventor on ten patents. In 1998, she received the Carl Zeiss Research Award for her pioneering work in novel modelocking and Q-switching techniques using SESAMs.
Ursi is a member of the OSA, IEEE, European Physical Society (EPS), the Swiss Physical Society (SPS) and the Swiss Academy of Technical Sciences (SATW). Since 1998 she has been an elected EPS board member in the quantum electronics division and since 2000 an elected member of the IEEE LEOS Board of Governors. She has been a topical editor of Applied Physics B since 1994. Since 1993 she has been serving on many program committees for CLEO, QELS, OSA Annual Meetings, EQEC, CLEO Europe, Ultrafast Electronics and Optoelectronics, Ultrafast Optics, Advanced Solid-State Lasers, and FST Japan. She was the program chair and general chair of Advanced Solid-State Lasers in 1999 and 2000 respectively. In addition, she organized jointly with Francois Salin the Ultrafast Optics conference in Ascona, Switzerland in 1999. She chaired the OSA 1998 Lomb Medal Committee.
Switzerland also turned out to be the solution to her bicoastal marriage, as her spouse Kurt Weingarten used it as an excuse to start his own company, Time-Bandwidth Products, where Ursi also serves as a scientific advisor on the Board of Directors. In their spare time they have also managed to create two boys - Matthew age 3, and Christopher age 1. In Ursi’s remaining spare time (what spare time?!) – in her spare time before having kids – she enjoyed many mountaineering sports , especially ski mountaineering, and many water sports such as scuba diving and wind surfing. Presently she tries to spend most of her non-work-related time with her kids. Based on her experiences, she feels that balancing a career, a spouse’s career, and a family is not only possible but fun and rewarding (but not necessarily relaxing . . . ), and would like to provide encouragement to women everywhere (and particularly in Switzerland) to consider this option. In the “big picture” she would like to see better infrastructure for kids care, so that professional women have less pressure to sacrifice their careers.