Dominique M. Dagenais is a program director at the National Science Foundation in the Division of Electrical, Communications and Cyber Systems in the Engineering Directorate. Her research interests focus on photonics.

After receiving her Diplôme d'Ingénieur from the École Supérieure d'Optique in Orsay, France, she spent a year at the Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester, where she defended a thesis on uniform pellet illumination for laser fusion. She then joined the French Atomic Energy Commission, working on high-power Nd:YAG laser propagation, before moving to the Boston area, where she developed beam-shaping optics for CO₂ lasers at AVCO Everett Laboratories.

In 1987, she joined the Naval Research Laboratory’s Optical Sciences Division, where she helped design and deploy the first three-axis fiber magnetic sensor and demonstrated record sensitivity. In 1999, she joined Alcatel to support the development of novel optoelectronic active and passive devices for wavelength-division multiplexing fiber telecommunications.

She has been at the National Science Foundation since 2009.