Vasily N. Astratov received the M.Sc. degree in physics from the St. Petersburg State University, Russia, in 1981. Since then, he was working as a Member of Research Staff (Senior Member of Research Staff from 1997) at the A. F. Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute, St. Petersburg, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1986. From 1993 to 1997 he headed a research group at the Ioffe Institute where he was a Principal Investigator in the project devoted to the optical properties of synthetic opals. He was the first to observe photonic band gap effects in self-assembled synthetic opals in 1995. In 1996 he was awarded a grant of Royal Society that enabled his visit to the University of Sheffield, U.K. From 1997 to 2001 he was a Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield, U.K., where he developed novel surface coupling techniques for studying photonic crystal waveguides, and was engaged in the studies of semiconductor microcavities. In 2002 he joined the Department of Physics and Optical Sciences of the Universtity of North Carolina at Charlotte, U.S.A., as an Assistant Professor. He has been an invited speaker at multiple international conferences and currently serves as an Associate Editor for the journal Optics Express. He is a member of a number of panels including NSF Panels on Photonics/Optics and International DFG Panel on photonic crystals in Germany. His research interests are in the optical properties and optoelectronic applications of novel micro-structured photonic materials.