Wilfried Blanc is Directeur de Recherche at CNRS and the Head of the Fiber Optics and Applications team at INPHYNI (Nice, France). He received the M.Sc. Degrees in Physics and the PhD degree in Physics from the University Claude Bernard, Lyon, France, in 1996 and 2000, respectively. He held a post-doctoral position at the University of Bordeaux (ICMCB laboratory), funded by Rhodia-Solvay. In 2002, he commenced work with the Center National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) at the Laboratoire de Physique de la Matière Condensée (now Institut de Physique de Nice), where his main interests are the design, realization, and characterization of silica-based optical fibers, which are made using the modified chemical vapor deposition (MCVD) technique. He has published 150 journal articles. He serves as Editor for Optical Materials and Optical Materials X (Elsevier) and for Glass Europe. He is a member of the International Commission on Glass (TC20 and TC28). Since 2020, he has been in the TOP 2% of the World Scientists list in Optoelectronics & Photonics (Stanford Univ. ranking).