OSA Board of Director Sophie LaRochelle obtained a Ph.D. degree in optics from the College of Optical Sciences, University of Arizona, USA. She is currently a professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Université Laval, Canada, where she holds a Canada Research Chair in Advanced Photonics Technologies for Communications. She is a member of the Center for Optics, Photonics and Lasers (COPL), a multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional research network in the Province of Quebec. Her current research activities focus on optical fiber design for MIMO-less spatial division multiplexing, multicore and multimode erbium-doped fiber amplifiers, and silicon photonic modulators and sensors. In her career, she has also made contributions to passive and active fiber devices, and their application to optical signal processing of analog and digital communications.

In 2015, she was elevated to the rank of OSA Fellow for “contributions to optical communications by proposing innovative fiber optic components such as super-structured fiber Bragg gratings for chromatic dispersion equalizers, multi-wavelength fiber lasers and optical code-division multiplexing”. She has served on the technical committees of numerous conferences, and several times as chair of subcommittees, including Optical Fiber Communication Conference (OFC), Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO), and Bragg Grating, Photosensitivity and Poling in Glass Waveguides (BGPP).

Prof. LaRochelle was very active in developing photonics research in Canada through the Canadian Institute for Photonics Innovations, a Government of Canada sponsored network of centers of excellence (CIPI). From 1999 to 2012, she was the principal investigator of four successive multi-university projects focusing on optical fiber components, fiber laser systems, and optical networking. Prof. LaRochelle is currently the co-leader of a multi-disciplinary research project involving scientists from biology, chemistry, physics, geological engineering and electrical engineering, aimed at developing photonics technologies for monitoring climate change in the Canadian North. She has led several industry sponsored projects, mostly in collaboration with small and medium size businesses, helping some of them through their start-up phase. Prof. LaRochelle was a member of the Advisory Committee to the Province of Quebec’s Minister of Economic Development, Innovation and Export, for the revision of the Québec investment policy in research and innovation (2009-2010). She also served on the Technical Advisory Committee of CMC Microsystems (2011-2013), including one year as Chair, and on its Board of Directors (2014-2016). She was recently appointed by Canada’s Minister of Science to the Governing Council for the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

At Université Laval, Prof. LaRochelle teaches electromagnetism and optical communications to electrical engineering students. She has developed a graduate course and a continuing education course on optical fiber components. She has been awarded the title of “Professor étoile” five times by the Faculty of Science and Engineering for excellence in teaching, a recognition based on student course evaluations. In her career, she has directed the research work of over 70 graduate students and post-doctoral fellows.