Paola Parolari received the Laurea degree in Telecommunication Engineering (’97) and the Ph.D. degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering (’01) from the Politecnico di Milano. From 2000 to 2008 she was a researcher in the Optical Communication System Laboratory of CoreCom, a consortium between the Politecnico di Milano and Pirelli & C. From 2009 she has been working as senior researcher in the Optical Communication Laboratory of Politecnico di Milano, DEIB. She is now Associate Professor at Politecnico di Milano, DEIB. She is a co-founder of the start-up company Cohaerentia. From 2011 to 2014 she has been WP leader of the FP7 EU project ERMES. From 2017 to 2021 she has been Project manager of the H2020 EU project PASSION. She is now involved in the EU Digital Europe Project QUID and in the PRIN Projects FIRST and SURENET. Since 2019 she is Publicity Editor for the IEEE/ OSA Journal of Lightwave Technology. Since 2021 she is member of the Scientific Committee of the CNIT National Laboratory FIBERS.
She has been/ is member of the Technical Program Committee of leading international conferences in the field of optical communications such as OFC, ECOC, ONDM, PSC, CLEO-PR. She was the chair of four Workshops/ Symposia related with optical access networks and quantum technologies application in the optical networks, hosted at the flagship international conferences OFC and ECOC . She is the lecturer of the BS class “Fundamentals of Communications and Internet”. She performs technical tutoring activity for bachelor, master and Ph. D. students. Her research interests include optical amplifiers, all-optical processing, highly spectrally efficient transmission systems, advanced modulation formats, access network technologies as WDM and OFDM PON, new architectures for the mobile fronthaul, partial MIMO-based Mode Division Multiplexing, coexistence of classical and QKD systems. She has co-authored more than 160 papers in international journals and conferences and she holds 13 international patents.