Philip St. J. 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 MA in 1976 and D.Phil. in 1979 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 behavior of light in periodically structured materials to nonlinear optics, waveguides, optical fibers, 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 Society and has won several international awards for his research including the Körber Prize for European Science, the Thomas Young Prize of the Institute for Physics (UK), and the Joseph Fraunhofer Award/Robert M. Burley Prize. He was a Director-At-Large of the OSA 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.