Dr Fatima Gunning received her B.Sc. degree in Physics in 1995, M.Sc. in Nonlinear Optics in 1997, and Ph.D in Optoelectronics in 2000 from Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Brazil, investigating the fundamental and induced nonlinear properties in glasses, optical fibres and planar waveguides through a technique called thermal poling. After several visits to British Telecom Research Laboratories in UK between 1996 and 2000, she joined Corning Research Centre at Adastral Park, UK, in 2001 to develop high-speed systems architectures and testing of advanced electroabsorption-based optical modulators for optical networks. She is co-founder of the Photonics Systems Group at Tyndall National Institute, Cork, Ireland, since 2003, focusing on novel spectrally efficient techniques for high speed optical transmission, including all-optical OFDM (Coherent WDM) and frequency comb generation, expanding communications to new wavelength windows (namely at 2microns), embedding research of novel photonic devices and integration designs, fabrication & testing into fibre communications sytesms, in addition to understanding the impact on using novel optical technologies to the OSI network stack.  The work developed in telecomms enabled her to also explore applications in sensing, in particularly with gas sensing. Dr Gunning is currently Head of Graduate Studies at Tyndall, SFI IPIC Investigator, and elected member of the IEEE Photonics Society executive board. She collaborates with many academic and industrial partners nationally and internationally through research clusters, EU collaborative projects and industrial contracts. She is award winner of the 2017 UCC Best Research Supervisor Award, a student-led nomination, and the innaugural SFI Mentorship Award in 2017.

PhD Engineering Science director (2018 onwards)

UCC Modules (shared):

• EE4007/EE6034 (2017 to date)
• PY4108 (2018 - 2020)
• PY4113 (2013 - 2022)
• PY4115 (2005 - )