Paola Parolari received the Laurea degree in Telecommunication Engineering and the Ph. D. degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from the Politecnico di Milano respectively in 1997 and 2001. Since 2000 she has held a permanent position as a researcher in the Optical Communication System Laboratory of CoreCom, a consortium between the Politecnico di Milano and Pirelli & C. She is now a researcher in the Optical Communication Laboratory of PoliCom, Department of Electronics Information and Bioengineering (DEIB).
Her research interests include devices for the optical signal processing exploiting Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers, all optical wavelength converters and demultiplexers, and optical amplifiers based on fiber nonlinearities (Optical Parametric Amplifiers, Fiber Raman Amplifiers, Stimulated Brillouin Scattering Amplifiers). Moreover she has been involved in projects relating transmission systems tolerant towards chromatic dispersion and systems at high spectral efficiency and high bit rate (PolMUX DQPSK at 40 and 100 Gbit/s), with both direct and coherent detections. She is now interested in advanced modulation formats (e.g. DMT) and in the development of access network technologies including WDM and OFDM PON and new optical fiber architectures to support the fronthaul network for new generation mobile networks (5G).
From 2012 to 2014 she was a work package leader of the FP7 EU project ERMES and she supported the coordinator in the project management; ERMES developed a network embedded transmitter for next generation access networks based on self-seeded RSOAs. She is now Project Manager of the H2020 EU project PASSION, which will develop new technologies for very high capacity metro networks.
She teaches seminars for the course “Optical Communications” of Politecnico di Milano and she performs technical tutoring activity for bachelor and Ph. D. students.
She has co-authored more than 100 papers in international journals and conferences and she holds 12 international patents.