2021 Optica President Connie Chang-Hasnain received her B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California, Davis (1982) and her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley (1987). Chang-Hasnain was a member of the technical staff at Bellcore (1987–1992) and Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University (1992–1995). She joined UC Berkeley as Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences in 1996. She was named Whinnery Distinguished Chair Professor since 2006 and served as Chair of the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Graduate Group at UC Berkeley 2006-2017. Since 2014, Chang-Hasnain is Associate Dean for Strategic Alliances of College of Engineering.  She is the Founding Co-Director of Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute (TBSI) and the Chief Academic Officer of Berkeley Education Alliance for Research in Singapore (BEARS) since 2015. She is an Honorary Member of A.F. Ioffe Institute (Russia), a Chang Jiang Scholar Endowed Chair at Tsinghua University (China), and a Visiting Professor of Peking University (China), National Jiao Tung University (Taiwan) and Nanyang Technological University (Singapore).

An Optica member since graduate school, Chang-Hasnain has been an active volunteer and held several leadership positions in the Society. She served as Associate Editor of the Journal of Lightwave Technology (2005-2006), and Editor-in-Chief 2007-2012. She was elected a Director-at-Large of the Board of Directors (1998-2000) and served on the Optica's Centennial Advisory Panel (2014-2016).  She was a member of the USAF Scientific Advisory Board, the IEEE LEOS Board of Governors, the National Research Council (NRC) Board on Assessment of NIST Programs, NRC’s Harnessing Light II, and US Advisory Committee to the International Commission on Optics.

Chang-Hasnain has been an enthusiastic meetings volunteer and organizer.  She served as CLEO Program Co-chair (1997) and General Co-chair (1999); OSA Slow and Fast Light Topical Meeting Program Co-Chair (2006) and General Co-chair (2007); and OSA Frontiers in Optics Conference General Co-Chair (2007). She was the General Technical Co-Chair (2004) and General Co-Chair (2005) for the Asia Pacific Optical Communications Conference.   

Chang-Hasnain’s research interests range from semiconductor optoelectronic devices to materials and physics, with current foci on nano-photonic materials, vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs) and their applications. 

Chang-Hasnain has been honored with the Optica Nick Holonyak Jr. Award (2007), the IEEE David Sarnoff Award (2011), the UNESCO Medal For the Development of Nanoscience and Nanotechnologies (2015), the IEEE LEOS William Streifer Award for Scientific Achievement (2003), and the Microoptics Award from Japan Society of Applied Physics (2009). She has been awarded with a DoD Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship (2008), a von Humboldt Foundation Research Award (2009), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2009). She is a Fellow of Optica and IEEE, and an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering. She was elected as Optica's Vice President in 2019.