Karen Volke-Sepúlveda is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Physics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), where she established the Optical Micromanipulation Laboratory. Her interests and research projects cover a range of topics, including the study of structured beams and vortices in optics and acoustics, the development of optical and acoustical trapping techniques for multidisciplinary purposes, the investigation of nonlinear optical properties of colloidal media and the study of analogous phenomena in wave fields.