Luc Thévenaz wins OFS Lifetime Achievement Award
Luc Thévenaz at OFS29. 2025 EPFL CC BY SA 4.0
EPFL School of Engineering Professor Emeritus Luc Thévenaz was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award of the 29th International Conference on Optical Fiber Sensors (OFS29) last week in Portugal. PhD student Yuting Yang also received an award for Best Student Paper.
Thévenaz, who led the Group for Fibre Optics, was honored for his "significant contributions for the advance of knowledge in fiber optic sensing and photonics" by the prestigious conference. "This recognition by my peers is obviously a great honor and very important to me," Thévenaz said.
An expert in fiber optics, optical communication, and signal communication, Thévenaz earned his PhD in physics in 1988 from the University of Geneva. He joined EPFL the same year, where he led his reseach group on photonics, fiber optics and optical sensing until 2023. His primary achievements include the invention of a novel configuration for distributed Brillouin fiber sensing based on a single laser source; the development of a photoacoustic gas trace sensor using a near infra-red semiconductor laser; and the first experimental demonstration of optically controlled slow and fast light in optical fibers realized at ambient temperature and operating at any wavelength. Thévenaz is the author or co-author of some 522 publications and 13 patents. He is a Fellow of the optical society Optica and of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), as well as a Full Member of the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences (SATW).
A second honor was also awarded to an EPFL representative at OFS29: a Best Student Paper Award for Yuting Yang, who was warmly congratulated for the quality of her presentation, Absolute temperature sensing in the 67-350 K range using Brillouin scattering in gases. Previously a member of the Groupe for Fibre Optics, Yang is currently a PhD student in the Laboratory of Applied Photonics Devices, led by Christophe Moser.