PHOTO PROVIDED / THE VILLAGE REPORTER
DOUBLY HONORED … Julie Eng and husband Lars stand in the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., when Julie was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering. Julie, a Bryan High School graduate, was presented the 2025 Dr. Lisa Su Woman of Innovation Award just four days prior.
By: Jesse Davis
THE VILLAGE REPORTER
jesse@thevillagereporter.com
After many years of advanced schooling and many more moving up through the ranks, Bryan High School graduate and chief technical officer of a global laser technology company, Julie Eng, has been recognized for her work with two honors in the span of a week.
Last month, Eng accepted the 2025 Dr. Lisa Su Woman of Innovation Award. The award – named after the CEO of tech company AMD – is given to recognize women “for their remarkable dedication and exceptional contributions to drive the development, innovation, growth, and long-term opportunities for the semiconductor industry,” according to the GSA Global website.
“That was a surprise to me,” Eng said. “I guess my company, they recommended me for that award, but they didn’t tell me that they did. It surprised me when they announced it.”
Just four days after receiving the award, Eng flew to Washington, D.C., to be inducted into the National Academy of Engineering.
According to Eng, an academy member has to nominate you, other members have to write letters on your behalf, and then they evaluate your complete body of work before you can be chosen as a member of the non-profit NGO.
The NAE is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, originally formed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863 as the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.
“They talked a lot about how it’s not just an honor, it’s actually about service to the United States,” Eng said. “If ever the government needs some kind of brain trust that they need to go work on something, they have this pool of people that they call on, and you get to be one of those people.”
Despite the dizzying height of the honors, Eng said she didn’t have an early drive to become an engineer, and that she didn’t know any scientists or engineers growing up, or anyone with a doctoral degree.
While in sixth grade, Eng moved with her family to Bryan, where her father owned a Ford dealership and her mother worked as an English teacher.
She attended St. Patrick Catholic School and discovered her talent for math while doing required testing managed by a local mechanical engineering society.
She won money taking the tests and continued to take them even after she left St. Patrick and started attending Bryan High School. “It was easier than babysitting!” Eng joked.
People who earned high scores on the tests were invited to a banquet, where Eng met several engineers who told her she should go into the field.
At first, she was unsure, until her father discovered a special program through Bryn Mawr College, through which she could take three years of science and liberal arts courses before transferring to California Institute of Technology to study engineering for another two years, earning degrees from both institutions.
Eng chose to pursue the opportunity and earned a BA in physics from Bryn Mawr in 1988 and a BS in electrical engineering from Caltech in 1989.
She followed those up with a master’s degree in electrical engineering in 1990 and a doctorate in electrical engineering in 1995, both from Stanford University.
During her schooling, Eng was able to intern at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, but it was her internship at AT&T Technologies’ Bell Labs that piqued her interest and pushed her career forward.
Through AT&T, Eng was able to receive a scholarship that covered the cost of her doctoral degree, with the only stipulation being that she had to work for them one summer.
“They would check in with me every single year,” Eng said. “I’d go visit them, give a talk on what I was working on. I met a lot of people. Then I got a job offer at Bell Labs, which was a great place to get a job in America at the time, so I went there.”
Eng spent the next eight years working on fiber optics at Bell Labs, through the telecom boom and bust.
She eventually became a manager and started to move away from research and into product development, later managing teams, then managing the managers of teams.
“After the boom and bust, I kind of looked around and thought, ‘Maybe it’s time to go back to California,’” Eng said. “I had two small kids at that time, and you want to go somewhere you can definitely always find a job.”
So, she and her family packed up and moved to Silicon Valley in northern California, where she got a job with Finisar.
The startup was founded by two people, who had already gotten it to $130 million in revenue by 2003, when she started working with them. Eng began another upward trajectory through that company, running bigger and bigger portions of their product development, specifically regarding fiber optics transceivers.
As the internet developed, data centers began popping up, and people needed higher bandwidth and higher speeds. Using lasers, new technology was able to overcome the challenge of signal distance being hampered by increases in bandwidth.
“Finisar grew from number eight in all optical components to, by the time we got bought, we were number one, commandingly, for a long period of time, and had gone from $130 million to $1.3 billion,” Eng said. “I was in charge of the engineering that delivered $1 billion out of that.”
Then, she said, Apple came knocking. They wanted to use the company’s laser technology in their phones.
After several more buyouts, the company eventually became known as Coherent.
“Then the CEO asked me to become CTO,” Eng said. “I’ve been doing that for about the last three years. It’s super cool to still do communications stuff and fiber optics, but we also make lasers for all these other applications.”
Those applications include simple things like cutting or coloring jeans, as well as uses like imaging animal brains to study Alzheimer’s, or inspecting 12-inch semiconductor wafers for microscopic defects.
Looking back on her career, Eng said taking chances, learning as much as you can, and exploring your options is incredibly valuable, noting that she didn’t enjoy the work she did at Fermi.
“Get the best education that you can. I think that’s very important. I actually think it’s important to get a broad education to make sure it’s the path you want,” Eng said, adding, “It’s super, super important to do internships, because sometimes with an internship you learn what you don’t like, and sometimes that’s more important than what you do like.”
She said sometimes you need to not be scared to stay open for a while until you figure out both what you like and what you’re good at.
“It pays to try different things because you learn all kinds of different things. It may seem scary, but different types of experience help you grow as a person, and you can give back more,” she said.