Roel Baets is full professor at Ghent University where he leads a mixed UGent – imec team. For about 40 years Roel Baets has worked in the field of integrated photonics, in multiple material platforms (silicon, silicon nitride, III-V). He has made diverse scientific contributions to this field, as well as to its applications and spin-off creation in telecom, datacom and sensing. He has led major research projects in silicon photonics in Europe and founded ePIXfab, the globally first Multi-Project-Wafer service for silicon photonics and now the European Silicon Photonics Alliance. In recent years his research has focused on medical and environmental sensing applications of silicon photonics. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, of the European Optical Society (EOS) and of the Optical Society (OSA). He has been a recipient of the 2018 PIC-International Lifetime Achievement Award and of the 2020 John Tyndall award.