2019 OSA Ambassador Clara Saraceno was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1983. After completing her studies in France, she received training in industry from 2007 to 2008 (Coherent Inc. Santa Clara, California). She then continued her academic training in Switzerland, completing a doctorate in Physics at ETH Zurich in 2012 which brought her, amongst other distinctions, the 2013 QEOD Thesis Prize, awarded by the Electronics and Optics Division of the European Physical Society. Most recently, her research work on high-power ultrafast lasers earned her the Sofja Kovalevskaja Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2015).

In 2016, she was appointed as Professor in the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology in the Ruhr University Bochum, where she currently works on various aspects of ultrafast laser science.

From 2013-2014, she worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Neuchatel and ETH Zürich, followed by a postdoc position from 2015 - 2016 at ETH Zürich. In 2016, she received a Sofja Kovalevskaja Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and became Associate Professor of Photonics and Ultrafast Laser Science at the Ruhr University Bochum, Germany.

In 2018 she received an ERC Starting Grant. The current main research topics of her group include high-power ultrafast lasers and Terahertz science and technology.