Clara Saraceno

Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany

Clara Saraceno is a full professor at the Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. She was born in 1983 in Argentina. In 2007 she completed a Diploma in Engineering and an MSc at the Institut d’Optique Graduate School, Paris France. She first worked as an engineering trainee at Coherent Inc. Santa Clara, California, until 2008. She then completed a PhD in Physics at ETH Zürich in 2012 where she carried out research on high-power ultrafast disk lasers. From 2013-2014, she worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Neuchatel and ETH Zürich, Switzerland, where she worked on high-flux XUV generation via high harmonics generation. In 2016, she received a Sofja Kovalevskaja Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and became Associate Professor of Photonics and Ultrafast Science in the Electrical Engineering Faculty at the Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, followed by a full professorship in the same university since 2020.

Prof. Saraceno’s research interests are in the development of high-power ultrafast laser systems and their application in driving secondary sources via nonlinear optics. One of her current main research areas is THz technology and spectroscopy, where her group aims to achieve high average power level broadband THz radiation.

She has received a number of prizes and awards including the ETH Medal for Outstanding PhD thesis (2013), the European Physical Society Quantum Electronics and Optics Division PhD prize in applied aspects (2013), the Sofja Kovalevskaja Award of the Alexander von Humboldt (2016), an ERC Starting Grant (2018), the SPIE Harold E. Edgerton Award for High-speed Optics (2024) and an ERC Consolidator Grant (2024). She was elected Fellow of Optica (formerly the Optical Society) in the 2022 class.