2018 OSA Ambassador Jelena Pesic is a research engineer with NOKIA Bell Labs, based in Paris, France. After receiving a Masters degree in Electrical Engineering from the faculty of Electrical Engineering at the University of Belgrade in Serbia, she completed a 6 month internship with the engineering school of Telecom Bretagne, located in Brest, France. This involved working on the optical access network, GPON (Gigabit Passive Optical Network) under the supervision of profs. Annie Gravey and Philippe Gravey. This rich experience encouraged her passion for research and subsequent enrolment into optics.

Jelena then completed her PhD in the subject of proactive restoration of backbone optical networks, with the French operator Orange Labs, under the supervision of Esther Le Rouzic and prof. Laurent Dupont. In recognition of this work, she received the award of best paper at the conference ONDM2011 (Optical Network Design and Modelling)
Following her PhD, she carried out two postdoctoral studies. During the first of these, she worked for INRIA (French National Research Institute) on the European project SASER, designing MAC layer for TWIN optical networks. During the second, she worked with Telecom Bretagne.

Jelena’s current position with Nokia Bell Labs affords her the opportunity to be part of future product innovation, as well as several European projects like SENDATE and  ORCHESTRA.  She has served as a technical committee member for OSA and IEEE international conferences, reviewed articles submitted for peer-review and accepted invitations to write and publish articles at various international worldwide conferences.