The end of a year is an excellent moment to reflect on the past and prepare the future. Looking for inspiration on photonics ? On its "Photon Terrace" educational website​, Hamamatsu​ shine​s​ some light on Prof. Thienpont’s energetic activities in photonics travelling back 35 years in time.

Join us in the celebration of 90 years FWO at Kennismakers event on 14 December!

The Open-Innovation Photonics pilot for North West Europe (OIP4NWE) aims to drastically reduce high R&D costs and time for SMEs in the field of photonics. A significant decrease of the defect rate in pilot production and a shorter throughput time can help establish a thousand integrated firms within a decade.

In 2013 the rumor circulated that Hugo Thienpont would be named for a Nobel Prize. He laughs that away: "It's interesting not me. By the way, engineers do not get Nobel Prizes." Today, Hugo takes up different roles as Vice Rector Innovation at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, as the head of the department Applied Physics and Photonics (TONA) and he also leads B-PHOT, the research group at VUB with seventy researchers in the technology of light.

Dag van de Wetenschap or Day of Science is a full day of celebration and presentation how science improves our daily life. At Muntpunt Brussels, our outreach team B-Photonics and researchers show the ways how Lifi speeds up Wifi, what role photons play in 3D printing of organs, how light technology improves the instant and painless diagnoses of cancer or diabetes or about Internet of Things.

In the context of his cotutelle, in joint supervision of Université of Toulouse (France) and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium), Ludovic has given the international jury a very clear presentation on the vertical integration of an electro-absorption modulator onto a VCSEL at 850nm for high-speed communications.

Food safety and quality has become increasingly important in our society. At the World of Technology and Science (WOTS) fair, researcher Lien Smeesters highlights the impact of photonics technologies to increase food safety while reducing food waste.

At the first ever edition of SuperNova, the VUB will showcase exciting advances in some of the most hyped technologies of the moment that lead to the world's most groundbreaking innovations. The Vrije Universiteit Brussel strongly believes in the power of working across disciplines, connecting with the outside world, bridging different disciplines and breaking down the walls.

B-PHOT researcher professor Nathalie Vermeulen and her team have discovered a very unexpected and far-reaching trait of graphene, a substance that is seen by many as a game-changing material of the future. Graphene is capable of changing the wavelength of light, and their research showed that instead of strong incoming light intensities as typically employed for this purpose, graphene has a better conversion efficiency for low incoming light intensities.

Have a quick tour at our Photonics Innovation Center with clean room facilities, technology hall and laser laboraties.

The postdoctoral researcher will combine innovative photonic crystal fibre technologies with the peculiar optical properties of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) to enable a new generation of second harmonic generation based microscopy within the multidisciplinary project CHARMING coordinated by B-PHOT.

The two-days Symposium both at VUB and UGent, starts with a guest lecture followed by the presentations of the 2nd year master students. After the presentation of their master thesis project to a jury of professors and to their peers, everyone could ask questions to find out more about the research of the students.