Welcome to the 13th episode of Innovation Matters, a podcast organized by the Netherlands Innovation Network. In this episode we’ll talk to Afke Schaart. This podcast episode is broadcasted from Shanghai, China.

Afke Schaart is the Senior Vice President and Head of Global Impact at the headquarters of Huawei in Shenzhen and the most senior foreign national currently working at Huawei. She previously worked in local and national government, at KPN, Microsoft and the GSMA (or the international association of telecommunications companies). The release of this episode coincides with February 11th, the International Day of Women and Girls in Science. Women are still under-represented in the tech industry worldwide, occupying just 12% of jobs in cloud computing, 15% in engineering, and 26% in data and AI. In this episode, we also dive deeper into topics such as achieving gender equality.

My guest today is Professor Gu Ying, she works at BGI in Shenzhen, China. She is Deputy Director at BGI-Research, China. She has a background in Oncology and Biotechnology and a PhD in Molecular and Developmental Biology.

In the second half of our episode, we have an open conversation about the position of women in academia in China, the opportunities and the challenges.

Photonics is the technology that focuses on the generation, transport, and detection of light waves and light particles, also called photons. Photonic solutions are a response to the growing need in the areas of communication, food production, living comfort, industrial digitization, and health.

In this episode, we invited two professors from Taiwan and the Netherlands. To discuss the development situation of photonics in the two areas. During the discussion, they also mention the more possibilities of light in the coming years.

We believed you will learn a lot about photonics and optics from their sharing! Enjoy!

Prof. Ching-Fuh Lin from National Taiwan University
He is the founding Director of Innovative Photonics Advanced Research Center (i-PARC) and a joint distinguished professor in the Graduate Institute of Photonics and Optoelectronics, Graduate Institute of Electronics Engineering, and Department of Electrical Engineering at National Taiwan University. His major research area is in photonics, including photonics sensing techniques, Si-based photonics, organic-inorganic composites for light emission & sunlight harvest, broadband semiconductor lasers & optical amplifiers, integration of photonics and electronics.

He is a Fellow of IEEE, a Fellow of SPIE, Member of Asia-Pacific Academy of Materials, and a member of OSA.


Prof. Herman Offerhaus from University of Twente
Prof. Offerhaus research aims at the exploitation of optical phase to enhance optical processes. He is involved in projects aimed at the detection of pathogens in blood through phase-coherent nonlinear (CARS) spectroscopy, the phase-locking of laser diode arrays, the spectral phase-shaping of ultra-short pulses and the generation of phase-coherent plasmon fields on metal-dielectric interfaces. All projects concern the development of physics and technology to (real) applications. Most projects involve cooperation with other (international) research groups or companies.
Specialties: Lasers, short pulse laser, nonlinear optics, CARS spectroscopy, holography