Saba joined the group as a research staff in November 2024. Before joining the group, she was a research staff member in the Optical Manipulation Group at the University of St. Andrews, where she specialized in designing and developing optical trapping systems. Her work involved both conventional trapping methods and advanced nanostructure-assisted near-field techniques to trap particles ranging from micron to nanoscale sizes. She also contributed to high-precision speckle metrology, utilizing integrating spheres, multimode fibres, and single scattering surfaces. Additionally, she worked on an optoacoustic imaging project, using droplet beams for the early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease.
Earlier in her career, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Singular Optics Laboratory at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India, where her research focused on engineering light beams through wavefront shaping, polarization structuring, and modulation of spatial coherence. She investigated the generation and detection of structured light embedded with singularities, both in free space and within few-mode fibres.
She completed her PhD at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India, in 2017, where her focus was on the technology development and modelling of few-mode fibres for spatial beam generation and multiparameter sensing. She was awarded a Women Scientist Project to develop an analytical algorithm for mode calculation of N-layered 1-D microstructure fibres, with the goal of designing host structures for high-performance nonlinear fibre devices such as flat-top supercontinuum sources and wideband parametric amplifiers.