2018 OSA Ambassador Andrea Blanco-Redondo is the head of the Silicon Photonics department at Nokia Bell Labs in New Jersey, U.S. Previously, she was the Professor Harry Messel Research Fellow at the School of Physics at the University of Sydney, Australia. She has 7 years of industrial research experience on photonics with the Aerospace and Telecom units of Tecnalia, one of the largest private research centers in Europe. Blanco-Redondo received her Ph.D. from the University of the Basque Country, Spain, and she was a master research student with the Photonics group of Aston University, U.K.

Blanco-Redondo currently serves on the Society's Board of Directors and Finance Council. She is also an Associate Editor of OSA Continuum. She was the chair of the Esther Hoffman Bellar Medal Committee in 2017-2018.

Amongst her most significant research achievements are the experimental discovery of a new type of solitary wave, the pure-quartic soliton, and the demonstration of the first nanophotonic topological system.

She is the recipient of the 2016 Geoff Opat Prize and the 2014 Ada Byron Award runner-up.