This article was originally published in Uniquely Wired.

The frontier of photonics is among the least predictable corners of modern engineering, a place where quiet research can grow into $5.5 billion dollar acquisitions inside a five-year window, and where the engineers closest to the science are often so invested in the technological developments that they are the last to learn how much value they have actually created. Angelina has been inside that turbulence from the start. The deal Marvell struck with Celestial AI in late 2025, the largest event in her professional life so far, arrived through her newsfeed the same way it arrived for everyone else. The role she holds today did not exist when she first sat down to work on the technology that produced it. Read across the whole arc, her career has been one long exercise in learning to work with things she could not predict.

Over Teams from Thessaloniki, an hour borrowed from a calendar that does not have many to spare, she begins where she always begins. With the physics.

The Magnetic Power of First Principles

Angelina grew up loving the predictability and purity of equations in high school. As she remembers it: "For me, it was really just about the math, physics and the equations. I loved the predictability, the harmony, and the order when you can actually derive the answer that follows straight from the first principles." When the time came to choose a path, she went where the equations were densest: electrical engineering at the University of Belgrade. There she found a department called Physical Electronics, which she describes as focused on optical sciences, and nanoelectronics. "That seemed like such a niche and interesting field where you could apply all these interesting equations in physics. It was just magnetic for me," she says.

The light, she clarifies, wasn’t what hit her first:

"Light somehow came consequently out of that. If I didn't work in photonics today, I would probably be in some other physics-based science."

Continue reading the article here.