Keynote Speakers 2026

Prof. em. Dr. Ursula Keller

ETH Zurich

Zurich, Switzerland

Ursula Keller is a pioneer in ultrafast laser science and technoloy. She was a professor in physics at ETH Zurich from 1993 to 2025 and directed the Swiss national research program NCCR MUST (Molecular Ultrafast Science and Technology) from 2010 to 2022. She received her Diplom in physics from ETH Zurich in 1984 and her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1989. She began her independent research career as a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs (1989–1993).

She was a co-founder and board member for Time-Bandwidth Products 1995-2014 (acquired by JDSU in 2014) and for GigaTera from 2000 to 2003, a venture capital funded telecom company during the “telecom bubble phase” which was acquired by Time-Bandwidth in 2003.  More recently she has been a co-founder of K2 Photonics in 2023. She also served on the supervisory board of Jenoptik from 2022-2026.

Keller made groundbreaking contributions to ultrafast solid-state and semiconductor lasers, including the development of semiconductor saturable absorber mirrors (SESAMs), ultrashort pulse generation in the single-cycle regime, frequency comb stabilization, the attoclock technique and attosecond transient absorption spectroscopy for probing quantum dynamics.

Her work has been recognized with numerous international awards, including the Swiss Science Prize Marcel Benoist (2022), IEEE Edison Medal (2019), OSA Frederic Ives Medal and SPIE Gold Medal (both 2020), European Inventor Award for lifetime achievement (2018), international member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (NAE 2026), the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS 2021) and the Royal Society in London (FRS 2025) and two ERC Advanced Grants (2012 and 2018). She supervised 101 Ph.D. students, published over 540 peer-reviewed papers, and holds an h-index of 125 with more than 60,000 citations (Google scholar). In 2022, she published the graduate textbook Ultrafast Lasers (Springer Verlag).

Prof. Dr. Jan Sperling

University Paderborn

Paderborn, Germany

Jan Sperling studied physics and mathematics at the University of Rostock. He received his PhD and habilitation in theoretical physics in 2011 and 2015, respectively, under the supervision of Werner Vogel. As a postdoc, he was working in the experimental teams of Ian Walmsley at the University of Oxford and Christine Silberhorn at Paderborn University. Since 2021, he is professor at Paderborn University, leading the Theoretical Quantum Science team, focusing on research in theoretical quantum optics and quantum information at the Institute for Photonic Quantum Systems (PhoQS).

Prof. Dr. Monika Fleischer

Eberhard Karls University Tübingen 

Tübingen, Germany

Monika Fleischer is a professor at the Institute for Applied Physics and the BioNanoPhysics Centre of Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen in Germany. She studied physics in Tübingen and at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK. After earning her PhD degree in physics in Tübingen, she continued research at University of Tübingen with stays at the Molecular Foundry of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA. Following an invited professorship at the University of Technology of Troyes in France, she was offered a tenure track junior professorship in Tübingen leading to the current professorship. She serves as a member of the Board of Directors at the Centre for Light–Matter Interaction, Sensors and Analytics (LISA+). Her research interests focus on nanofabrication, optical spectroscopy and numerical simulation of optical antennas and hybrid nanoantenna configurations, e.g. for plasmonic sensing or tailored emission purposes.

Dr. André Gomes

Leibniz IPHT

Jena, Germany

André Gomes is a junior researcher in the Holographic Endoscopy group within the Department of Fiber Research and Technology at Leibniz IPHT. He completed his Master’s degree in Physics Engineering at the University of Porto in 2016 and later his PhD in Physics in 2021 at INESC TEC and the University of Porto, including a research stay of over two years at Leibniz IPHT, with a focus on optical fibre sensors. In 2022, his doctoral work was recognised with the Best PhD Thesis in Optics and Photonics award by the Portuguese Society for Optics and Photonics. He subsequently joined the Holographic Endoscopy group as a postdoctoral researcher, focusing on advancing multimode fibre-based holographic endoscopes, including the implementation of STED microscopy and other advanced imaging capabilities. His current work is directed towards translating these technologies into medical imaging applications.