Frédéric Grillot is currently a Full Professor at Télécom Paris (France) and a Research Professor at the University of New-Mexico (USA). His research interests include, but are not limited to, advanced quantum confined devices using III-V compound semiconductors, quantum dots quantum dashes, light-emitters based on intersubband transitions, non-classical light, nonlinear dynamics and optical chaos in semiconductor lasers systems as well as microwave and silicon photonics applications.
 
Professor Grillot has made outstanding technical contributions in photonics and optical communications. He has intensively contributed to the development of quantum dot devices enabling their utilization as future active devices with superior performance. In particular, his recent achievements on epitaxial quantum dot lasers on silicon are crucial for the development of isolation-free integrated technologies. Among his major achievements, he also reported the first private optical communication using mid-infrared chaotic light, giant pulses emission in quantum cascade devices as well as multigigabits operation in the thermal atmospheric window with unipolar quantum optoelectronics. Overall, his research is a strong input to the advancement of science and to the emerging practical applications in computer and quantum technologies, as well as in more traditional areas such as optical communications.

Professor Grillot strongly contributes to promote and support the development of the general optics community. He has served diligently and successfully Optica in particular as an Associate Editor of Optics Express, now as a Deputy Editor since September 2022. As of now, he has published more than 130 journal articles, 3 book chapters, and delivered many invited talks in major international conferences and workshops. Frédéric Grillot is also a Fellow Member of the SPIE as well as a Senior Member of Optica and the IEEE Photonics Society. In 2022, he received the IEEE Photonics Society Distinguished Lecturer Award which honors excellent speakers who have made technical, industrial or entrepreneurial contributions to the field of photonics.

Amr S. Helmy is a Professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Toronto. Prior to his academic career, Amr held a position at Agilent Technologies - UK, between 2000 and 2004.  At Agilent his responsibilities included developing lasers and monolithically integrated optoelectronic circuits. He received his Ph.D. and M.Sc. from the University of Glasgow with a focus on photonic fabrication technologies, in 1999 and 1994 respectively.  He received his B.Sc. from Cairo University in 1993, in electronics and telecommunications engineering science.

His research interests include photonic device physics and characterization techniques, with emphasis on plasmonics, nonlinear and quantum photonics.

Dr. Sheng-Lung Huang received the B.S. degree from the Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan University, in 1986, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park in 1990 and 1993, respectively.
He joined the Graduate Institute of Photonics and Optoelectronics (GIPO) and the Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan University, in 2006. He is now a Distinguished Professor. He served as the Chairman of GIPO from 2007 to 2010. He was also a guest professor at the Abbe School of Photonics, Friedrich-Schiller University of Jena, Germany, in 2014. Before joining National Taiwan University, he served as Chairman of the Institute of Electro-Optical Engineering, National Sun Yat-Sen University, from 2003 to 2005.
Dr. Huang’s research interest is in crystalline fiber-based devices and applications. He pioneered the development of cellular-resolution optical coherence tomography and has used it clinically in the early-stage diagnosis of cancers and diseases. In 2014, he co-founded the Apollo Medical Optics (AMO) and served as the Chief Technology Officer. Later, he served as the Chief Science Officer until 2021. The AMO won the National Innovation Award in 2020. Dr. Huang served as Chairman of IEEE/LEOS (now IEEE/PS) Taipei Chapter from 2005 to 2006. He was a steering board member of the European Master of Science in Photonics (EMSP). Dr. Huang served as an Associate Editor of the IEEE
Photonics Journal and was a Topical Editor, Optics Letters, for 6 years (2005–2011). He was a Guest Editor for Taiwan Photonics Society Quarterly in 2008.
Dr. Huang has received the Outstanding Research Award from the Ministry of Science and Technology and the University/Industry Cooperation Award from the Ministry of Education. He has also been jointly awarded Chimei Innovation Excellence Award and Optical Communications Elite Award. He is a Fellow of Optica (formerly OSA).

Salah S A Obayya joined Zewail City of Science and Technology (ZC) in 2012 where he is now Chair Professor and Founding Director of Center for Photonics and Smart Materials (CPSM). He occupied the positions of the Vice Chairman of ZC and Director-General of Research Institutes at the same institution. Prior to Zewail City, he took up several academic posts at Brunel University UK (tenured Associate Professor, 2002), University of Leeds, UK (tenured Professor, 2006) and University of South Wales, UK (tenured Chair Professor, 2008) where he was the Founding Director of Photonics and Broadband Communications (PBC) Research Center and also he was the Director of Postgraduate Programs at the same institution. In May 2006, he has been naturalised as “British” citizen.
He has established an outstanding international reputation in the area of green nanophotonics with focus on the intelligent computational modeling of modern nano-photonic devices enabling technologies needed to realise low-carbon green society. He has published 271 journal publications, mostly in OSA, IEEE and IET/IEE, authored 3 books (Computational Photonics, Wiley 2010 and Computational Liquid Crystal Photonics, Wiley 2016, Computational of Photonic sensors, 2018) both are adopted references for Graduate Programs in Photonics at international Universities such as MIT, Purdue University, Indian Institute of Technology, National University of Singapore, Mansoura University and Zewail City, and 264 conference papers in international conference in photonics, many of these are invited talks, and keynote lectures, attracted external funding, from both industry and Research Councils, in the region of $ 4M, and supervised to successful completion 35 PhD students, over 70 MSc/MRes/MPhil students and 15 postdoctoral research fellows. He led the team that developed one of the world’s best comprehensive numerical packages for the analysis, design and optimization of nano-photonic devices, and subsystems, where a number of “world-first” numerical approaches have been developed. His five key papers introducing his novel numerical package; have been cited more than 400 times.  His publications also have been cited more than 4000 times, with an h-index of 34 and i10-index of 118. His numerical package has been widely adopted by both academic and industrial Photonics communities to analyze, design and optimize the performance of a wide range of nano-photonic devices employed for applications in solar cells, optical telecoms, sensing, optical imaging and encryption and other applications.
He has served the International Photonics Society through active contribution to the organization and technical committees of a number of international conferences. Since 2007, he has been an Associate Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Photonics Technology Letters, and Associate Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Optical and Quantum Electronics, and served as Guest Editor-in-Chief of J Optical and Quantum Electronics (2010), and founding member of Editorial Board of Materials Theory Journal (Springer) and acted as Reviewer for many international Photonics Journals such as IEEE J Lightwave Technology, IEEE Photonics Journal IEEE J Quantum Electronics, IEEE J Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics, IET Optoelectronics, OSA Optics Express, OSA Optics Letters, and many others. Moreover, he acted as Technical expert and Reviewer for a number of research funding councils and learnt societies such as Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), UK, Royal Society, UK, Royal Academy of Engineering, UK, National Academy of Arts and Sciences, Holland, Science and Technology Development Fund, Egypt, National Telecom Regulatory Authority (NTRA), Egypt and others.

Karsten Rottwitt received his Ph.D. degree from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) in 1993 and continued at DTU as a Postdoc until the end of 1995. From 1995 to 1998 he joined AT&T, Bell Labs and from 1998 to the end of 2000 he was with Lucent Technologies, Bell Labs Innovations. Subsequently, he moved back to Denmark and continued his carrier, first at the University of Copenhagen, and then in 2002 he re-joined DTU, where he since 2011 has been a Full Professor. He is currently heading the Fiber Optics, Devices, and Nonlinear Effects Group at the Department of Electrical and Photonics Engineering, DTU. His research interests include nonlinear effects in optical fibers, both fundamental aspects as well as applications. Lately, he has been involved in establishing efforts within Quantum information sciences. He has co-authored one graduate level textbook on nonlinear optics. In 2019 he was appointed Senior Member of Optica, the former OSA, and as of July 2022 selected as Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Photonics Society.

Sze Y. Set is an Associate Professor at the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology (RACST), the University of Tokyo. He received a B.Eng (Hons) degree in Electronics Engineering, with 1st-class honours, from Southampton University. He was awarded the Overseas Research Studentship (ORS) to pursue his PhD at the Optoelectronics Research Centre, Southampton University, where he participated as a research assistant in the EU ACTS project “MIDAS”, leading the field trial to demonstrate the first 40Gb/s optical signal transmission over 140km installed optical fiber link in Torino using midspan spectral inversion. From 1998 – 2001, he was a JSPS post-doctoral research fellow The University of Tokyo, RCAST, Japan. After spending a year as a senior R&D engineer at Micron Optics, Inc., Atlanta, USA, he joined a university startup in Japan, Alnair Labs Corporation, in 2002 as a R&D General Manager. He was appointed as the CEO and president of the company in 2005 and have successfully turning around the company to profitability. He returned to the University of Tokyo in 2016. as an Associate Professor.

Professor Set's research focuses on carbon nanotube photonics, ultrashort pulsed fiber lasers, ultrafast nonlinear optics, bio-photonics, optical communication, fiber optic sensing and laser 3D imaging. He also has a keen interest in university technology commercialisation, start-ups and entrepreneurship. He supervises graduate students at the Graduate School of Engineering, Department of Electrical Engineering and Information System and teaches two graduate courses in entrepreneurship at the Department of Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies . He has contributed to 10 patents and over 200 academic publications in international journals and conferences. Professor Set is a Fellow of the Optical Society (OSA/OPTICA), the Deputy Committee Member of the Japan Society of Applied Physics (JSAP), and an Associate Editor of the IEEE Journal of Quantum Electronics.

Professor Set was elected as a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge University in 2021. Currently, he is associated with the Cambridge Graphene Centre, where he will be pursuing research devices using graphene and related advanced materials to develop and fabricate graphene-enabled functional photonic devices and laser sources. He is also be involved with the Entrepreneurship program at the Cambridge Judge Business School.