Hugo Thienpont, professor at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and director of the FlandersMake@.VUB core lab B-PHOT, has been awarded with the 2021 SPIE gold medal. This award is the highest honour that the International Society for Optics and Photonics bestows. It is awarded in recognition of outstanding engineering or scientific accomplishments in optics, photonics, electro-optics or imaging technologies and applications.
His accomplishments include the creation of the Brussels Photonics research team; pioneering and implementing a photonics-engineering curriculum in Europe; creating Photonics4Life, the Network of Excellence in Biophotonics, and the pan-European research-and-innovation-focused Network of Excellence on Micro-Optics (NEMO); creating and developing Photonics 21; and co-founding UNESCO's International Year of Light (IYL) and International Day of Light (IDL).
Prof. Thienpont, thank you for your commitment and congratulations with this award!
