Alvaro Casas Bedoya is currently a postdoctoral research fellow, the hybrid Integration deputy project leader and, and the OSA/SPIE student chapter advisor in CUDOS. He received his PhD in physics from the University of Sydney in 2013 where he investigated photonic crystals and optofluidics. He received a double MSc degree in Photonics (through the Erasmus Mundus program) from St Andrews & Heriot-Watt universities in Scotland (2008) and Gent & VUB Universities in Belgium (2009) (Distinction level). His MSc research was based in Silicon-On-Insulator and photonic sensing architectures. He obtained a BSc. (Physics) (Hons) from Universidad del Valle in Colombia (2005) where he built a high power CW-C02 laser which was used for material processing.