Abstract:
Advancing women in science and engineering is not solely a women’s issue; it is essential to institutional excellence, scientific innovation, and the responsible use of talent and public resources. Drawing on the collective action of women faculty at MIT—documented in the landmark 1999 MIT Report and, more recently, in the 2023 book The Exceptions—and on my experience establishing the ETH Women Professors Forum at ETH Zurich, I will examine how coordinated advocacy, evidence-based analysis, and committed male allyship can drive lasting institutional change.
The talk will address persistent structural barriers, including decision-making concentrated within small informal networks, inconsistent procedures, unequal access to institutional resources and opportunities, and heightened exposure to bias when women assume leadership roles. These failures damage careers, waste talent, and undermine institutional credibility. I will argue that transparent governance, clear accountability, and equitable, performance-based access to resources and influence are prerequisites for inclusive excellence. Ultimately, the success and integrity of our institutions depend on their ability to recognize and integrate talent beyond the dominant in-group. The central lesson is that change is possible—but it requires collective action, supporting measures and a shared commitment from women and men to build cultures that reward merit, expand opportunity, and accelerate innovation.
Biography
Ursula Keller is a pioneer in ultrafast laser science and technoloy. She was a professor in physics at ETH Zurich from 1993 to 2025 and directed directed the Swiss national research program NCCR MUST (Molecular Ultrafast Science and Technology) from 2010 to 2022. She received her Diplom in physics from ETH Zurich in 1984 and her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1989. She began her independent research career as a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs (1989–1993).
She was a co-founder and board member for Time-Bandwidth Products 1995-2014 (acquired by JDSU in 2014) and for GigaTera from 2000 to 2003, a venture capital funded telecom company during the “telecom bubble phase” which was acquired by Time-Bandwidth in 2003. More recently she has been a co-founder of K2 Photonics in 2023. She also served on the supervisory board of Jenoptik from 2022-2026.
Keller made groundbreaking contributions to ultrafast solid-state and semiconductor lasers, including the development of semiconductor saturable absorber mirrors (SESAMs), ultrashort pulse generation in the single-cycle regime, frequency comb stabilization, the attoclock technique and attosecond transient absorption spectroscopy for probing quantum dynamics.
Her work has been recognized with numerous international awards, including the Swiss Science Prize Marcel Benoist (2022), IEEE Edison Medal (2019), OSA Frederic Ives Medal and SPIE Gold Medal (both 2020), European Inventor Award for lifetime achievement (2018), international member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (NAE 2026), the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS 2021) and the Royal Society in London (FRS 2025) and two ERC Advanced Grants (2012 and 2018). She supervised 101 Ph.D. students, published over 540 peer-reviewed papers, and holds an h-index of 126 with more than 61,000 citations (Google scholar). In 2022, she published the graduate textbook Ultrafast Lasers (Springer Verlag).