Thomas Geernaert

Thomas Geernaert was born in Dendermonde, Belgium, in 1983. He received the Graduate degree in electrotechnical engineering with majors in photonics in 2006 and the Ph.D. degree in engineering in 2011 both from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium (VUB). He received the Photonics21 Student Innovation Award 2012 for his work on fiber Bragg gratings sensors in photonic crystal fibers. Since 2011, he is working as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO-Vlaanderen) at the Brussels Photonics Team B-PHOT (www.b-phot.org) of VUB. He is actively involved within European funded projects, Flemish strategic basic research projects, and several R&D projects with industry. He serves as a Conference Program Committee Member of the Optical Sensing and Detection conference at SPIE Photonics Europe and of the Photonics Applications for Aviation, Aerospace, Commercial, and Harsh Environments conference at SPIEs Optics+Photonics symposium. He coauthored 20 journal papers and 30 publications in international conference proceedings indexed by the Web of Science Core Collection. He gave seven invited talks at international meetings. He coauthored one book chapter and is a coinventor of two patent applications. He is a Member of the SPIE, the IEEE Photonics Society, and the OSA.