Roberta Ramponi is a Full Professor of Experimental Physics at the Politecnico di Milano, where she chaired the BoS and MoS degrees in Engineering Physics from 2007 to 2012. From November 2013 to February 2022 she has been the Director of the Institute for Photonics and Nanotechnologies of the Italian National Research Council.

She has been the president of the European Optical Society (2006-2008), and of the International Commission of Optics (2017-2021), now being the past-president of the latter. Since 2010, she is a member of the Board of the Stakeholders and of the Extended Executive Board of the European Technology Platform and Public Private Partnership Photonics21. She chairs the corresponding National Technology Platform AEIT-CORIFI (Coordination of Photonics Research and Innovation in Italy). Since 2007 she is a member, and since 2018 the chair, of the TSOSA Committee (Trieste System Optical Science and Applications) at ICTP (The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics). Since 2014 she is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Bruno Kessler Foundation in Trento. Since 2022 she is the president of the Technical & Scientific Advisory Board of Area Science Park, Trieste.

Her research, as shown in her publication list (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=rrbq7ggAAAAJ&hl=it&oi=ao), has covered a wide range of activities in the fields of .Quantum Electronics, Optoelectronics, Quantum Optics and Photonics. During the first years she worked on the development of laser-based instrumentation for biomedicine, mainly for diagnostic applications; later on, her research activity has focused on Nonlinear Optics, Integrated Optics, and related applications. In particular she has developed innovative techniques for the fabrication of waveguides in nonlinear crystals, passive and active glasses and for the accurate characterization of such waveguides; moreover she has studied the design and realization of all-optical devices for applications to sensors and optical communications. More recently she has been involved in the design and realization of integrated micro-optofluidic devices, by means of direct writing with femtosecond laser pulses for the fabrication of optical waveguides, and of the same technique followed by chemical etching for microchannels. At present she is also involved in the design and realization by femtosecond direct writing of integrated optical chips for quantum information.

In 2020 she received the OSA (now OPTICA) Robert E. Hopkins Leadership Award, and she is Fellow of OPTICA and of the European Optical Society.