The industry’s most innovative people 2024 Kithinji Muriungi


Organisation: KamsHub Role: Founder


Some may know Muriungi through his leadership role as the IEEE Photonics Society Associate VP for Chapter Relations; others may be more familiar with his work as the founder of KamsHub. He has made this innovation-based startup focused on developing human-centred solutions, solving local problems powered by technology. An Expert Fellow at Engineering for


Change (E4C), Muriungi’s work includes addressing challenges in Kenya, his home country. Peers say his dedication to community and continuous education shines through this role, while he


Kitty Jochem


Organisation: SMART Photonics Role: Vice-President, Integration Group


Celebrated by those who know her as an example to many young women in the photonics sector, colleagues and peers describe Kitty as the principal integration driver of the greatest ideas that come from the SMART Photonics R&D department towards manufacturable devices. She has been with the company for 10 years and started her career at the US firm JDS Uniphase as an R&D engineer. Spells at the COBRA Research Institute,


Cedova and Philips predated her arrival at SMART Photonics in 2013 as a senior


Based in: Eindhoven, The Netherlands


Education: Chemistry at Saxion University of Applied Sciences


process engineer. SMART Photonics is an independent pure-play foundry – producing high-end photonic integrated circuits. One of last year’s Photonics100 honorees,


Luc Augustin, CTO at her firm, says: “Kitty has been a great help throughout my career – starting at university, where she was always working hard to get things going. She later introduced me to my first job in the industry, where we were close colleagues. Now, at SMART, we work together again and we can rely on each other's knowledge.”


Luana Olivieri


Organisation: Loughborough University Role: Research fellow


Luana Olivieri is currently a Leverhulme Trust Early Career research fellow for the investigation of complex media, e.g. semi- transparent and scattering materials, with all-optical tools. In a paper released in 2023, Olivieri demonstrated a novel non-invasive methodology to reconstruct volumetric information of complex semi-transparent objects at terahertz frequencies, by accessing and deconvolving the spatial and temporal information of light. The research at Loughborough


University, which was in collaboration with Professor Marco Peccianti, Dr Luke Peters, Dr Juan S Totero and a team of


Based in: Loughborough, UK Education: PhD, University of Sussex


experts from the Emergent Photonics Research Centre (EPicX) and is published in ACS Photonics journal, demonstrates that terahertz waves can be used to locate and recognise embedded objects and features, such as cracks and bubbles, in microscopic three-dimensional space. Terahertz waves have several properties


that make them extremely useful, such as their ability to penetrate opaque objects without causing harm. Olivieri’s primary research activity during her PhD has focused on the theoretical definition and experimental implementation of a new near-field ‘ghost imaging’ technique at terahertz frequencies.


Based in: West Lafayette, IN, US Education: BE, Moi University, Kenya


admits “as an engineer and an impact change-maker, I am passionate about developing human-centred solutions that leverage emerging, trending, and future technologies”. He has led crowd-funded projects


to improve design-team capacity on electronics design for solar pumps for small-scale farmers. Engineering and improving use cases of photovoltaics is a wonderful example of using photonics technology for the greater good. Muriungi is currently a research assistant in engineering education at Purdue University, USA.


34 Photonics100 2024


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