Speaker biography Zahra Nafar
Zahra Nafar was born in Iran, Tehran, where she received her B.S. degree in bioelectrical engineering. After working for an ophthalmic instrument company, she decided to continue her graduate education and obtained her Ph.D. in biomedical engineering with a focus on biomedical optics, ophthalmic imaging and vision science. She is now the Senior Systems Engineer in a R&D group at ZEISS Medical Technology in the US, participating in the development of novel ophthalmic diagnostic imaging systems.
Speaker biography Nancy Hecker-Denschlag
Nancy Hecker-Denschlag is an American, who has been living and working in Europe for over 27 years. She received her B.S. in physics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and her Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University supported by an AT&T Bell Laboratories fellowship. As a postdoc on Lise-Meitner (Austria) and Alexander von Humboldt (Germany) fellowships, she was involved in extensive basic research up to the assistant professor level at the Universität Innsbruck and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.
After moving from the university setting to industry, she worked at Siemens in R&D on optical telecommunications and moved to development as the System Design Authority for SURPASS HiT7500. Although a physicist by training, she has extensive experience in sales as a Key Account Manager and in management of two high-tech companies as the Managing Director of a small optical measurement company in Ulm, Germany, and Managing Director of a startup in mass spectrometry in Innsbruck, Austria.
Today, she works at ZEISS Medical Technology as a member of the Advanced Technologies team in Oberkochen, Germany, developing surgical microscopes. In her free time, she wants to promote science and encourage young people to follow careers in STEM fields by founding a new museum: an Albert Einstein Discovery Center in Ulm, Germany ‒ Einstein’s birthplace.