Professor Gérard A. Mourou currently serves as the Directeur of the Laboratoire d' Optique Appliquée at ENSTA-Ecole Polytechnique. He previously served as the A. D. Moore Distinguished University Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and as the Director of the Center for Ultrafast Optical Science at the University of Michigan. 

Professor Mourou has been a pioneer in the field of ultrafast lasers and their applications in scientific, engineering and medical disciplines. At the University of Rochester with his students he demonstrated the technique of Chirped Pulse Amplification (CPA) that has bridged the field of optics traditionally in the electron volt to Relativistic Plasma Physics, Nuclear Physics, High Energy Physics and Astrophysics. In high speed electronics, he introduced the Electrooptic Sampling and the generation of THz pulses. In material science, he showed the first picosecond structural probe (picosecond electron diffraction). At the University of Michigan, with his students, he discovered the light channeling, and the deterministic character of the damage threshold in the femtosecond time scale. With his colleagues, he applied this property to nanomorphing and in ophthalmology to eye surgery, focusing on photorefractive surgery, a technique known as Intralasik. 

He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He is the recipient of R. W. Wood Prize from the OSA, the Harold E. Edgerton Award, from the SPIE, the D. Sarnoff Award from IEEE. He received from the University of Michigan the Russel Award. He is a fellow of the Optical Society of America. 

Dr. Yves Bellouard is Assistant Professor in Micro-/Nano- Scale Engineering at the Eindhoven University of Technology in The Netherlands. He received a BS in Theoretical Physics and a MS in Applied Physics from Université Pierre et Marie Curie in France in 1994-1995 and a PhD in Microengineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Switzerland in 2000. Dr. Bellouard is the recipient of the Omega Scientific Prize (2001) awarded by the Omega Foundation for outstanding individual contributions in the field of Micro-engineering, Condensed Matter Physics and Chronometry for his work on Shape Memory Alloys. 

Before joining Eindhoven University of Technology, Dr. Bellouard worked as a Research Scientist at the Center for Automation Technologies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York where he also taught Precision Engineering and Micro-Robotics. While at Rensselaer, he closely collaborated with Translume on its development of novel integrated monolithic devices that incorporate both optical and mechanical functions.