Kayla Filipek is currently Electro-Optical Engineer at Lockheed Martin company, based in Arlington Texas. Kayla earned her BS in Optical Sciences and Engineering at the Wyant College of Optical Sciences (OSC), University of Arizona, Tucson, in 2021. She worked in Prof. Saikat Guha’s group, under the guidance of Dr. Allison Rubenok, on quantum limited photon detection using single-photon and homodyne-detection setups, for applications in quantum communications, specifically on an optical receiver for unambiguous state discrimination (USD) of three coherent state codewords. Kayla is an avid swimmer, and during her time as an UG student at UArizona, she was the Vice President of Outreach & Advocacy for Women in Optics (WiO) at OSC.