Michelle Sander

Michelle Yen-Ling Sander is a German and American optical engineer whose research involves lasers and fiber optics for ultrafast photothermal spectroscopy, and studying the effects of ultrafast light pulses on matter.¹ She is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Boston University, with secondary appointments in biomedical engineering and materials science engineering.²

Sander grew up in Germany,¹, and has been fascinated by light since she was a child.³ She came to the US as a Fulbright Scholar,¹ and received a master's degree from Georgia Tech in 2004, before finishing a diploma at TU Braunschweig in Germany in 2006.⁴

She defended her Ph.D. in electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2012.² Her dissertation, High repetition rate fiber and integrated waveguide femtosecond lasers, was jointly supervised by Erich P. Ippen and Franz X. Kärtner.⁴

Sander was named by Optica as an Optica Ambassador in 2017, as a Senior Member in 2019, and as a Fellow in 2025;³ her Fellow award cited her "seminal contributions to ultrafast fiber lasers and their applications in imaging, material characterization, and modulation".⁵

She was a 2025 recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.⁵