Dr. Xiaoyi Bao is a Professor of Physics at the University of Ottawa. Dr. Bao's research includes study of nonlinear effects in fibers for sensing, devices and communications, development of distributed fiber optics sensors for temperature, strain, vibration, acoustic wave, birefringence and refractive index for chemical and bio-sensing, static and dynamic monitoring of civil structures, nonlinear scattering and parametric amplifications, study of the dynamic polarization mode dispersion effects in field fibers, Rayleigh, Brillouin and Raman scattering based distributed sensors and their applications; micro- and nano -fibers based sensors and devices, and highly coherent fiber laser design and development.

From 1994 to 2000 she was a Professor at the University of New Brunswick. In 2000 she joined the Department of Physics of the University of Ottawa as a professor. In 2003 she became a Canada Research Chair (Tier I) in Fibre Optics and Photonics. She received the University of Ottawa Inventor of the Year Award for 2003. She is fellow of Royal Society of Canada (RSC), Optical Society of America (OSA) and SPIE. She has published over 210 refereed journal papers in journals.