I am the eldest child in my family, so I took responsibility and led at a very young age. When I was 14, I had my first class in photonics and semiconductors. I found it interesting and had good marks for these classes. With new generations of photonics technologies, I found myself going in this direction.

There weren’t many research groups working on vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) at the time I did my PhD, especially on indium phosphide (InP) VCSEL. I was a PhD student and post doctoral researcher in this area at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology before I moved to the US with Bandwidth10.

I was hired by a wonderful manager who helped me a lot to support a technology transfer effort from research to product. This was one of the greatest accomplishments of my career. I then succeeded with the product team at Bandwidth10 to bring to market innovative products based on the high-contrast grating tunable lasers at the 1060nm wavelength.

I am the mom of two wonderful boys. They were still babies (aged two and nine months) when we moved from Switzerland to the US without any other relatives; the US was a new country completely different from Europe and North Africa in culture, lifestyle, and food. I was alone with my kids for nearly two years during this time, as my husband was working in Europe. With all these changes in my life, and after approximately eight months of work progress, I gave a live demo and demonstrated the wide sweep rate of our tunable lasers. That sweep rate exceeded the customer’s expectations! It was a true high point for me.

For young, aspiring women: be proud of yourself. A secret I used for motivation was to reward myself. Every time I was successful with results during my PhD and my post-doc studies, had good conference talks, obtained new funding to continue my studies, I would buy something precious for myself, mostly jewelry. Now, I have a collection that I take out from time to time to remind myself of each success.

Dalila Ellafi
Program Manager, Bandwidth10
Born in France, of Tunisian descent / Resides in United States
Educational Background: Engineering Diploma in Telecommunications, MS in Photonics, National Engineering School, Tunisia; PhD in Telecommunication: Laboratory of Physics of Nanostructures (LPN), Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Switzerland / National Engineering School, Tunisia