The membership of Optica (formerly OSA) has elected James Kafka, chief technology officer at Spectra-Physics and MKS Fellow, USA, as the society’s 2023 vice president. Julie Sheridan Eng, chief technology officer at Coherent, USA, and Ulrike Fuchs, vice president for strategy and innovation, Asphericon, Germany, were elected as directors-at-large for a 2023 – 2025 term. The Optica board of directors appointed Aleksandra Boskovic, Corning, USA, as a director-at-large from 2023 – 2025.

“Jim knows Optica very well; he became a member in 1976 as an undergraduate student studying optics at the University of Rochester and has been a dedicated volunteer over the decades,” said the CEO of Optica, Elizabeth Rogan. “As the CTO for Spectra-Physics and a Fellow of its parent company MKS, Jim is highly active in both business and science. He will be an effective facilitator of Optica’s work to serve the field's large and diverse community of students, industries, and academic institutions worldwide. We look forward to him joining the Optica board leadership.”

In 1983, Jim Kafka started his career in industry as a senior scientist at Spectra-Physics Lasers, where he has since held a series of positions of increasing responsibility and until becoming CTO, his current position. He was recently named a Fellow of MKS, the parent company of Spectra-Physics. During the past 38 years, he designed several of the company’s most significant products, including the Tsunami, the first commercial ultrafast Ti:sapphire laser (1990), the Millennia X, the first commercial 10-W solid-state green laser (1997), and the InSight, the first broadly tunable ultrafast source for microscopy (2011). Kafka was recognized as a Spectra-Physics Fellow in 1987. He also received the Thermo Electron Corporate Award for Technical Innovation in 2002 and the first Newport Corporation Strategic Patent Award in 2007 for his first diode-pumped double-clad fiber laser patent. Kafka has 45 United States patents and multiple foreign equivalents. Kafka was named an Optica Fellow in 2005 and served as a director-at-large on Optica board of directors from 2012 to 2014.

Julie Sheridan Eng serves as CTO at Coherent Corp., Saxonburg, Pennsylvania. In this role, she focuses on the future technology platforms that are core to Coherent’s strategy and to its drive for sustainably profitable growth. Prior to being named CTO, Dr Eng was senior vice president and general manager of Coherent’s optoelectronic devices and modules business unit. In that role, she oversaw engineering, product management, and operations for GaAs vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs), InP directly modulated lasers (DMLs) and detectors, and CMOS/BiCMOS integrated circuits for datacom, 3D sensing, and high-volume consumer applications. Dr Eng came to Coherent from Finisar, where she held a number of senior management positions, including executive vice president and general manager of 3D Sensing and executive vice president of datacom engineering. Over the 15 years that she managed datacom transceiver engineering at Finisar, her teams released over 180 fiber-optic transceiver products and achieved numerous industry firsts. Dr Eng began her career as AT&T Bell Laboratories, where she led the development of laser-based datacom transceivers. Dr Eng has been a tireless advocate of women’s contributions to STEM. She is a past chair of the IEEE committee on women in engineering and presently serves on the SPIE executive advisory group. She holds six US patents, and was elected a Fellow of Optica for distinguished contributions to the advancement of optics and photonics.

At Asphericon, Ulrike Fuchs oversees all R&D activities as well as strategic product development. With her team, Fuchs develops concepts to improve system performance prediction during optical design and tolerancing. Most recently, she has emphasized transferring those ideas to freeform optics. In 2018, Fuchs was the inaugural winner of Optica’s Kevin P. Thompson Optical Design Innovator Award. She has registered six patent families and supervised more than 20 BSc and MSc theses in the field of optics. She was elected a Fellow of Optica in 2020. In 2021, she was appointed to the faculty advisory board of the physics department, Friedrich-Schiller-University of Jena, Germany.

Aleksandra Boskovic serves as vice president for optical communications technology development at Corning. She is responsible for ensuring an integrated technology strategy and innovation delivery across fiber, cable, and connectivity. This includes delivering the most valuable components and solutions to Corning’s customers, while capitalizing on competitive advantages in fiber, cable, connectivity, actives, and software. Boskovic joined Corning in 1997 as a scientist at Corning’s main R&D center in NY. Throughout her career, Boskovic has built a strong track record in technology leadership in broad technical areas touching all of Corning's businesses. Boskovic is an Optica fellow and member of IEEE Photonics Society.