1. Prof. Donna Strickland
Donna Strickland received her B. Eng. from McMaster University and her PhD from the University of Rochester. Along with her PhD supervisor, Dr. Gerard Mourou, Donna Strickland co-invented Chirped Pulse Amplification. Dr. Strickland was a research associate at the National Research Council of Canada, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a member of technical staff at Princeton University. Dr. Strickland joined the physics department of the University of Waterloo in At Waterloo, Dr. Strickland's ultrafast laser group develops high-intensity laser systems for nonlinear optics investigations. She is a recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship, a Premier’s Research Excellence Award, a Cottrell Scholars Award and is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America. She served as the 2013 OSA president.

2. Associate professor & rookie entrepreneur, Prof
 Associate professor & rookie entrepreneur, Prof. Boudoux obtained her PhD from the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program (USA). She then completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Ecole Polytechnique (France) before starting her laboratory, in 2007, at Ecole Polytechnique Montreal (Canada). Her research topics range from laser-tissue interactions to novel hardware for imaging. With a colleague and strategic investors, she later founded Castor Optics, a spin-off company commercializing a new line of double-clad fibers couplers. 
Yanina Shevchenko completed her MSc and PhD at Carleton University, Ottawa. While specializing in biophotonics and plasmonic fiber biosensors as a graduate student, Yanina pursued other, adjacent with photonics research areas later in her career. In particular, she worked and published on a number of projects revolving around complexity, new biologically and mathematically-inspired robotics and tissue engineering while completing her postdoctoral fellowship at MIT and Harvard Universities. Upon the competition of the fellowship, Yanina transitioned to work in the corporate strategy/finance and now is a part of a corporate strategy team at TD Canada Trust working on implementation of new analytics-enabled and data-driven financial products.
Yanina has been actively involved with the non-profit and outreach organizations throughout her career. Currently, she is a member of the Nonprofit Committee at Women in Finance Foundation and Women in Leadership at TD  and serves as an editor OSA's Optics and Photonics News Magazine helping with and overseeing Career Focus column.

3. Biography Prof. Sophie LaRochelle
Professor Sophie LaRochelle received a Bachelor's degree in engineering physics from Université Laval, Canada, in 1987; and a Ph.D. degree in optics from the College of Optical Sciences, University of Arizona, USA, in 1992 under the supervision of Prof. George Stegeman. From 1992 to 1996, she was a Research Scientist at the Defense Research and Development Canada - Valcartier, where she worked on electro-optical systems. She is now a professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Université Laval, where she holds a Canada Research Chair (tier 1) in Advanced Photonics Technologies for Communications. She is a renowned expert in fiber optics components and communications with more than 150 papers published in refereed journals, almost exclusively in IEEE or OSA journals, and more than 200 papers in international conference proceedings. Her work has been highly cited, receiving more than 4300 citations according to Google scholar (h-index=34, i10-index=110). She is the co-author of eight patents (three licenced to the industry). She has served on the advisory or technical committees of many organizations. In career, she has directed the work of more than 60 graduate students and post-doctoral fellows and has led several industry-sponsored projects. Professor LaRochelle is an OSA Fellow.
Her current research activities are focused on active and passive components for optical communication systems including optical fibers for spatial division multiplexing on vectorial modes or modes carrying orbital angular momentum, multicore and multimode erbium-doped fiber amplifiers, silicon photonic filters and modulators for short range communications, and wavelength converters for packet switched networks. Over the years, she has made contributions in the field of fiber lasers (tunable, multiwavelength, high power, narrow frequency or pulsed), all-optical signal processing (dispersion compensation, photonic code identification, pulse rate multiplication, pulse shaping and beam forming), analog optical transmissions (radio-over-fiber, GPS-over-fiber, ultrawideband-over-fiber), and code division multiple access with frequency encoding.
Prof. LaRochelle has been very active in developing photonics research in Canada through the program of the Canadian network of centers of excellence Canadian Institute for Photonics Innovations (CIPI). From 1999 to 2012, she has successively been the leader of four major multi-university projects: Fiber optics components and devices, Advanced fibre laser systems, Packet switched networks with photonic code-based processing, and Optical packet-switched architecture and technologies for data centers. She has served on the technical committees of many conferences, and several times as chair of subcommittees, including the Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC, OSA/IEEE conference), Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO, OSA conference), Bragg Grating, Photosensitivity and Poling in Glass Waveguides (BGPP, OSA topical meeting), Photonics in Switching (OSA topical meeting), IEEE summer topical on Spatial division multiplexing and multimode photonics, and Photonics North (SPIE). Prof. LaRochelle has also served on the Advisory committee to Quebec’s Minister of Développement économique, de l’innovation et de l’exportation, M. Clément Gignac, for the revision of Québec investment policy in research and innovation ( ) and on the Board of directors of CMC microsystems.

4. Dr. Dan-Xia Xu is a Principal Research Officer with NRC, an adjunct professor with Carleton University, and a Fellow of OSA. She received her Ph.D. from Linköping University (Sweden) working on SiGe transistors and tunneling diodes. Since joining NRC, she has developed high speed SiGe HBTs and photodetectors, and pioneered the use of nickel silicide for deep sub-micron VLSI. She later switched her research to integrated optics. In she was part of the research team at Optenia Inc. that successfully developed the first commercial glass waveguide echelle grating demultiplexer. Since 2003, she has led the pioneering work in cladding stress engineering for polarization control of photonic components, and in high sensitivity silicon photonic waveguide sensor systems. She has served on the technical committees of many conferences, as a chair or a committee member. Her current research interest is silicon photonics and photonic integration for optical communications and biological sensing. She has co-authored over 350 publications, several book chapters, and holds seven patents.