Profile

Julie Sheridan Eng serves as Senior Vice President and General Manager of II-VI Incorporated’s Optoelectronic Devices and Modules Business Unit. In this role, she oversees 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 and 3D sensing applications. Prior to joining II-VI, Eng served as General Manager of Finisar Corporation’s 3D Sensing Business Unit, Executive Vice President of Finisar’s Transceiver Engineering, and Director of Transceiver Engineering at AT&T/Lucent/Agere.

During Eng’s 14-year tenure as head of Finisar’s Transceiver Engineering, under her engineering leadership, Finisar became a technology powerhouse in the fiber optics industry. The teams she managed delivered over 200 optoelectronics products to market, which were qualified by all major OEM and datacenter customers, shipped in very high volume, and contributed materially to the buildout of the fiber optic enterprise and datacenter networks. In addition, her team demonstrated many industry firsts, including the first demonstration of 100Gb/s (CFP) and 200Gb/s (QSFP56) transceivers, as well as the first demonstrations of 25Gb/s and 50Gb/s VCSELs and DMLs.

In 2018, Eng transitioned to 3D sensing VCSELs, and the teams she is managing have brought up state-of-the art 6² GaAs VCSEL laser manufacturing capability and have qualified multiple GaAs VCSEL 3D sensing products that are shipping in high volume into consumer and automotive markets for applications such as proximity sensing, facial recognition, and photo enhancement in mobile phones, as well as in-cabin sensing and LiDAR in automobiles.

Eng is a Past Chair of the IEEE Committee on Women in Engineering and presently serves on the SPIE Executive Advisory Group. She has published over a dozen papers, co-authored a book chapter, holds six U.S. patents, and has given numerous invited talks. Eng holds a B.A. degree summa cum laude in Physics from Bryn Mawr College, a B.S. degree with honors in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. She was recently elected an Optica Fellow.

Election Statement

I’m honored to be nominated to run for Optica Director-at-Large. I’ve been in optics my entire career, starting out in the late 1980s as an intern at AT&T Bell Labs when fiber optics was in its infancy. I started attending the Optica-sponsored Optical Fiber Communication (OFC) Conference in the early 1990s, when it was a smaller technical conference with a limited trade show. Through the ensuing 30 years, I can remember the excitement that built up to each OFC as we planned our demonstrations of industry firsts and strived to get them working before our competition, as we worked together with other companies in the optics industry to demonstrate end-to-end links for each new data rate, and as we summarized our technical results and waited to hear if they were good enough to be selected as post-deadline papers.

In reflecting on this, I realize the impact that a global optical society has had on my career and on the various companies I’ve worked for. It gives us a global forum to share information, to benchmark our results, to challenge each other to become better, and to move forward as an industry.

Given that background, one of my major goals as an Optica director would be to support the high quality of Optica technical meetings, ensuring those meetings continue to showcase world-class research and technology development, drive engagement in our industry and support peer-to-peer interactions. After two years of the pandemic, some people will be excited to be back in a large public forum, while others may still want to avoid in-person engagement or limit travel. We need to ensure that our conferences, workshops, and other events emerge from the pandemic with the same level of influence on the industry that they had pre-pandemic. This requires that we determine how to hold events that are vibrant and engaging for all attendees—in-person and virtual. In addition, from a technical perspective, there are new emerging areas such as 3D sensing, VR/AR and biosensing, and we should ensure that these new fields find a technical community within Optica.

It’s also valuable to continue the diversification of Optica, both in its membership and its global influence. As a director, I would strive to make sure that the membership of Optica mirrors that of the optics community. We need people from diverse backgrounds, from different countries and optics disciplines, and from academia, small companies, large companies and government labs. We need to ensure that we’re engaging our members and serving them well.

In addition, we are a society of deep expertise. I would work to promote Optica as an international resource, supporting investment and funding in optics, offering expertise and providing outreach and education about optics careers in conjunction with the Optica Foundation.

I’ve had a long career in optics, in fiber optics and in 3D sensing, and I would be proud to work to support the optics community and further Optica’s goals as a director.