Paola Parolari received the Laurea degree in Telecommunication Engineering from the Politecnico di Milano in 1997. In 2000 she received the Ph. D. degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from the Politecnico di Milano. Since 2000 she has held a permanent position as a researcher in the Optical Communication System Laboratory of CoreCom, a consortium between the Politecnico di Milano and Pirelli & C. She is now a researcher in the Optical Communication Laboratory of PoliCom, Department of Electronics Information and Bioengineering (DEIB).
Her research interest include devices for the optical signal processing exploiting Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers, all optical wavelength converters and demultiplexers, and optical amplifiers based on fiber nonlinearities (Optical Parametric Amplifiers, Fiber Raman Amplifiers, Stimulated Brillouin Scattering Amplifiers). Moreover she has been involved in projects relating transmission systems tolerant towards chromatic dispersion and systems at high spectral efficiency and high bit rate (PolMUX DQPSK at 40 and 100 Gbit/s), with both direct and coherent detections. She is now interested in the development of access network technologies for WDM and OFDM PONs and of novel architectures to support the fronthaul network of next generation mobile technologies. 
She has been work package leader of the FP7 EU funded project ERMES and she supported the coordinator in the project management; ERMES developed a network embedded transmitter for next generation access networks based on self-seeded RSOAs.
She teaches seminars for the course “Optical Communications” of Politecnico di Milano and she performs technical tutoring activity for bachelor and Ph. D. students. 
She has co-authored nearly 100 papers in international journals and conferences and she holds 12 international patents.