Astghik Chalyan
Astghik Chalyan (17-04-1993), MSc, is a STEM and outreach officer at VUB B‑PHOT Brussels Photonics. She is committed to promoting STEM and STEAM education, especially photonics, through the development of hands‑on and engaging educational materials.
Astghik joined the B-PHOT outreach team in 2021, working under the guidance of the late Tine De Pauw, who inspired her commitment to STEM outreach. Currently, Astghik leads VUB’s participation in the CARLA and 360 CARLA European projects and supports the MSCA LasIonDef and QU‑ATTO projects by training early‑stage researchers in photonics outreach. She has also contributed to Flemish initiatives such as Groeituin and Groeihuis.
She holds a Master’s degree in Electronics and Nanoelectronics (2015, Russian‑Armenian University, Armenia) and a Bachelor’s degree in Physics (2013, Yerevan State University, Armenia). From 2018 to 2021, she conducted PhD research as an MSCA ITN-EID Early Stage Researcher on the xCLASS project, a collaboration between Anteryon BV(NL) and VUB B‑PHOT (BE). Her academic achievements include the Annual Educational Award of the President of Armenia in IT (2015) and an Erasmus internship at the NanoScience Laboratory, where she focused on nonlinearity in strained silicon. In parallel, she was involved in the European Project “IRIS” (2017, University of Trento, Italy). She worked for 3 years as a LabVIEW software engineer in Armenia.
Astghik is an active member of Optica, SPIE and IEEE.
She also serves as CEO of EYEST (Excite Youth for Engineering, Science and Technology), overseeing the Photonics Explorer Kit program, PHABLABS 4.0 workshops, and global training activities. To date, EYEST has distributed more than 4,700 Photonics Explorer Kits to schools worldwide.