Dr. Katharine Schmidtke is co-founder of Eribel Systems and Adjunct Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.  She previously directed sourcing for Meta’s custom AI accelerators and next generation optical interconnect technology. She has over 25 years of experience in the Opto-Electronics industry including strategic roles at; Finisar Corporation, JDSU Uniphase, and New Focus. Katharine received a Ph.D. in non-linear optics from University of Southampton and completed post-doctoral research at Stanford University.