The Photonics 100

For the second year in a row, Electro Optics, a platform providing commentary and analysis on topics of interest for the Photonics industry, has created a list of 100 noteworthy innovators.  The idea was to celebrate the often unsung heroes at the cutting edge of the industry – Chief Technical Officers, Heads of R&D, Senior Engineers, research leaders, entrepreneurs and others.

The Photonics 100 team, in collaboration with the team at Europa Science, asked for nominations operation in the following categories: 

Photonics vendors – suppliers and integrators of photonics components and systems, such as optics, lasers, sensors, test and measurement, optoelectronics, illumination and imaging.

Original Equipment Manufacturers using photonics – integrators using photonics as an enabling technology in vertical markets such as life sciences, defence, automotive, aerospace, mechanical engineering, electronics, semiconductors and optical communications.

Start-ups – companies under five years old, operating as either a photonics vendor or an OEM (as defined above).

Academia/research – either those involved in photonics research itself or those using photonic technology to further research in a non-photonics field, such as physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, engineering and more.

The finalists who, according to the Electro Optics team, represent a snapshot of “the people that drive our industry forward – the innovators, the boundary-pushers, the disruptors, the out-of-the-box thinkers and the R&D ‘rock stars”, included two ICFO alumni working in start-up companies they helped to found.

Sebastian Etcheverry, Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of LuxQuanta. This company was spun out of ICFO in May 2021 after incubating in the ICFO KTT LaunchPad. Before LuxQuanta Etcheverry was a postdoctoral fellow at ICFO for four years from 2017-2021, having previously received his doctorate in Engineering Physics/Applied Physics from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden.

Barbara Buades is the CEO and co-founder of photonics database company Meetoptics as well as an Optica Ambassador, with more than 29,000 followers on LinkedIn. “Meetoptics,” she says, “has created the largest database of products and technologies in the industry to help engineers and researchers find and understand the products they need to develop their technology more efficiently.”

Congratulations to Sebastian and Barbara and to their innovative companies that are making a mark on the Photonics Industry.