It is our great pleasure to announce that the "15th IEEE Photonics Society Benelux Annual Workshop" will be held at Mons University, Belgium on June 15th, 2011.
On behalf of the members of the Organising Committee, we would like to invite you to attend and/or contribute to this scientific and technical event related to the fields of optics and photonics. Our goal is to provide a common forum especially for young researchers in order to interact with other scientists and professors from universities and research centres in the Benelux.
We would like to encourage interested young researchers to contribute with a presentation on their own research and send us a one-page paper for review by the Programma Committee. The scope of the workshop is very broad and covers the wide range of topics within the research field of photonics (sensing, semiconductor laser physics, optical communication, non-linear optics, ...). At the end of the workshop, an award will be granted to the author of the best paper.
Invited speakers
This year’s workshop is honored by two invited talks given by given by Dr. Sylvie Delepine-Lesoille from ANDRA and Dr. Thomas Geernaert, from Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB).
Dr. Sylvie Delepine-Lesoille
Sylvie Delepine-Lesoille was born in Paris, France, in 1975. She was graduated as an engineer from Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Techniques Avancées in 1997, with a specialization in Nonlinear Optics (Master of university Paris XI). She joined Alcatel Corporate Research Center as a PhD candidate in 1997, to work with semiconductor flared laser, and was graduated in June 2000 from university Paris XI.
From 2000 to 2002, she worked at Photonetics-NetTest on tunable and wavelength switchable external cavity lasers. From 2002 to 2008, she was a researcher in LCPC (French Road and Bridges Institute), in the division Metrology and Instrumentation, focusing on optical fiber sensors for civil engineering applications. Since 2008, she has joined ANDRA (French ) to work on the instrumentation of nuclear waste geological repository.
There, her main research topics are optical fiber sensors to provide distributed temperature and strain measurements in concrete, metallic and soil structures, and time domain reflectometry sensors for water content measurements. She is the French representative for COST action OFSeSa ; she is author or co-author of 20 articles, a book chapter and a patent.
Dr. Thomas Geernaert
Thomas Geernaert was born in Dendermonde, Belgium in 1983. He graduated as Electrotechnical Engineer with majors in Photonics in 2006 and received his PhD in Engineering in 2011, both at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) in Belgium.
His master thesis covered simulations on the potentialities of radiative cooling of optical Raman amplifiers and Raman lasers. In his PhD thesis 'Microstructured fiber Bragg grating sensors: from fiber design to sensor implementation' he designed, simulated, characterized and implemented a temperature-insensitive optical fiber sensor for hydrostatic pressure and transverse strain measurements with applications in aerospace, structural engineering and medical diagnostics.
For his PhD work at B-PHOT he was awarded with a scholarship from the Institute for the Promotion of Innovation through Science and Technology in Flanders (IWT-Vlaanderen).
T. Geernaert contributes to the European Commission FP7-ICT funded project PHOSFOS (Photonic Skins for Optical Sensing) and the European IAPP Marie Curie project SmartSOCKET (Intelligent amputee sockets employing real time advanced photonic sensors for optimum fit and pressure relief through active controls). He was also active in the Flemish IWT-SBO funded project FAOS (Flexible Artificial Optical Skins) and in the European COST 299 action FIDES (Optical Fibres for New Challenges Facing the Information Society) with short term scientific missions to the Institute of Photonic Technology (IPHT, Jena, Germany) and to the Cyprus University of Technology (CUT, Nicosia, Cyprus).
He was supervisor for 5 Master theses and 2 internships at B-PHOT between 2007-2010 and acts as teaching assistant for the courses 'Waves, Electromagnetism and Relativity' (prof. Francis Berghmans and prof. Jan Danckaert) and 'Optical Sensors' (prof. Francis Berghmans) since 2007.
T. Geernaert authored and co-authored 8 SCI-indexed journal papers and 14 publications in international conference proceedings. He co-authored 1 book chapter and is co-inventor of 2 patent applications. He served as secretary on the board of the SPIE Brussels Student Chapter (Belgium) and is a member of SPIE and OSA.