Natalia Trela-McDonald is General Manager, UK & Head of Solutions at PowerPhotonic. She is responsible for guiding teams in R&D, design, and simulation to scale up freeform and wafer-scale optics technologies for sectors including medical, materials processing, and defence. She engages in customer-facing roles, defining solution requirements, ensuring performance metrics (uniformity, power handling, profile fidelity), and translating emerging photonic research into commercially-viable optical components.