Philip Russell is Director at the Max-Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen, Germany and holds the Krupp Chair in Experimental Physics at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. He obtained his M.A. (1976) and D.Phil. (1979) degrees at the University of Oxford and subsequently worked in research laboratories and universities in France, Germany and the USA. His research interests range from the behaviour of light in periodically structured materials to nonlinear optics, waveguides, optical fibres and their applications. He has over 600 publications and is co-inventor on 37 disclosures or patents covering many aspects of photonics. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Optical Society of America (OSA) and has won several international awards for his research including the 2005 Körber Prize for European Science, the 2005 Thomas Young Prize of the Institute for Physics (UK) and the 2000 OSA Joseph Fraunhofer Award/Robert M. Burley Prize. He was a Director-At-Large of the Optical Society of America 2007-2009 and from 2005 to 2006 he was an IEEE-LEOS Distinguished Lecturer and the recipient of a Royal Society/Wolfson Research Merit Award.