Wim Bogaerts is a professor in the Photonics Research Group at Ghent University and the IMEC nanotechnology research center in Belgium. He completed his PhD in 2004, pioneering the use of industrial CMOS fabrication tools to build photonic circuits. Between 2000 and 2010, he was the driver behind the buildup of IMEC’s silicon photonics technology. In parallel, he started developing design automation tools to implement complex silicon photonic circuits. In 2014, he co-founded Luceda Photonics, bringing the design tool IPKISS to the market. In 2016 he won a research grant from the European Research Council, and since then he is again full-time at Ghent University – IMEC, focusing on the challenges for large-scale photonic circuits and the new field of programmable photonics. He is an IEEE and OPTICA Fellow, and senior member of SPIE. Since 2023, Wim is also the chair of ePIXfab, the European Silicon Photonics Alliance.