Prof. Ursula Keller

Ursula Keller, a tenured professor of physics at ETH Zurich since 1993, leads the Ultrafast Laser Physics group, and currently also serves as a director of the Swiss multi-institute NCCR MUST excellence program in ultrafast science since 2010. Born 1959 in Zug, Switzerland, she received the Physics “Diplom” from ETH Zurich in 1984 and the Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Stanford University, USA in 1989. She was a Member of Technical Staff (MTS) at AT&T Bell Laboratories in New Jersey from 1989 to 1993. She was a “Visiting Miller Professor” at UC Berkeley in 2006 and a visiting professor at the Lund Institute of Technologies in 2001. Since 2014 she has been a member of the research council of the Swiss National Science Foundation. She is the first elected president and co-founder of the ETH Women Professors Forum. She has been a co-founder and board member for Time-Bandwidth Products since 1995 and for GigaTera from 2000 to 2003, a venture capital funded telecom company during the “bubble phase” which was acquired by Time-Bandwidth in 2003. TimeBandwidth Products was acquired by JDSU in 2014. Her research interests are exploring and pushing the frontiers in ultrafast science and technology: ultrafast solid-state and semiconductor lasers, ultrashort pulse generation in the one to two optical cycle regime, frequency comb generation and stabilization, reliable and functional instrumentation for extreme ultraviolet to X-ray generation, attosecond experiments using high harmonic generation, and attosecond sience. Awards include the Charles Hard Townes Award of OSA 2015, the Geoffrey Few Fellowship of the Australian Academy of Science 2015, the Arthur L. Schawlow Award 2013, the highest achievement award of the Laser Institute of America (LIA), the ERC advanced grant in 2012, EPS Senior Prize in 2011, the OSA Fraunhofer/Burley Prize 2008, the Leibinger Innovation Prize 2004, and the Zeiss Research Award 1998. The Thomson Citation Index ranked her as the third-place top-cited researcher during the decade 1991-99 in optoelectronics. OSA, SPIE, IEEE and EPS Fellow, member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Academy Leopoldina and the Swiss Academy of Technical Sciences.