Christina C. C. Willis

Christina C. C. Willis is an American laser scientist who works in optics and high-power laser development. She is involved with policy, outreach and volunteering. Willis is a board member of SPIE, the international society of optics and photonics. As of January 2019, she completed an 18-month expedition around the world. She is serving as an Arthur H. Guenther Congressional Fellowship from 2019 to 2020. In January 2020, she published the book Sustainable Networking for Scientists and Engineers, which addresses networking in a holistic sense, encouraging readers to treat professional support as a resource that is sustained by contributing more than you can take.

Education and early career Willis attended York School. She studied at Wellesley College, receiving the BA in physics in June 2006. During the summer, she was an undergraduate research fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Maryland, where she designed and constructed a piezo-actuated device for on-demand production of ultra-small (Femtolitre) water droplets for use in optical trapping and analytical chemistry experiments. After graduating from Wellesley College, Willis worked as an assistant engineer at the National Metrological Institute of Japan, Time and Frequency Division, Tsukuba, Japan. Here, she authored and illustrated an end-user assembly and calibration manual for a 50+ part iodine-stabilized helium neon laser, which had been designed for metrological applications and used as the international length standard. In September 2009, she earned a Master's degree in Optics from the College of Optics and Photonics (CREOL) at the University of Central Florida, and in August 2013, she earned a Ph.D. in Optics from CREOL. From 2014 Willis worked as a laser scientist at Fibertek Inc. in Herndon, Virginia. She is serving as an Arthur H. Guenther Congressional Fellowship from 2019 to 2020.