Dr. Maria Spyropoulou received her Diploma in Applied Mathematics and Physical Sciences from the National Technical University of Athens (Greece) in 2004 and her M.Sc. degree in Communication Systems and Signal Processing from the University of Bristol (UK) in 2005. Within the years 2006-2010 she worked as a research scientist at the Optical Communications Laboratory of the Athens Information Technology –AIT (Greece) in the framework of the European projects TRIUMPH and COST Action 291 on the topic of all-optical multi-wavelength regeneration based on Quantum-Dot SOAs. Since 2010, she joined the Photonics Communication Research Laboratory (PCRL) of NTUA and she has been involved in the ICT research projects APACHE, EUROFOS, RAMPLAS and SPIRIT. In January 2013, she received her PhD degree from the Department of Informatics at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece) on “All-optical signal processing SOA-based sub-systems for high-speed networks”. Her current research interests lie in the field of software-defined photonic subsystems. She has authored/co-authored 28 IEEE journal/conference publications and 3 book chapters. In 2011, she was among the CORNING student paper award competition finalists for the work “Large-scale photonic integrated circuit for multi-format regeneration and wavelength conversion”, OFC 2011, paper OThY2.