Optica President Elect Gerd Leuchs is the Director Emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen, and an adjunct professor within the physics department of the University of Ottawa.  After 15 years in academic research at the Universities of Cologne, Munich and at JILA, Boulder, Colorado, he worked at a Swiss optics company for five years before becoming full professor at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg. His scientific work includes quantum beats, photo-electron angular distributions in multi photon ionization, quantum noise reduced and entangled light beams and solitons in optical fibres, quantum communication protocols, focusing light beams and nanophotonics.

For five years, Gerd Leuchs led the German gravitational wave detection group (1985-1989). He has been a Visiting Fellow of JILA, Feodor-Lynen Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Heisenberg Fellow of the German Science Foundation, Visiting Professor at the Australian National University, at the University of Adelaide and the Laboratoire Kastler Brossel of the Ecole Normale Supérieure. He is member of the German Physical Society, the German Society for Applied Optics, the European Physical Society and the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and Fellow of the Institute of Physics, of Optica, and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He holds honorary degrees from the Danish Technical University and Saint Petersburg State University.

In 2005, he received the Quantum Electronics Prize from the European Physical Society, and in 2018, the Herbert Walther Prize jointly awarded by Optica and the German Physical Society (DPG). He won an advanced grant from the European Research Council, a mega-grant from Russia as well as a Julius-von-Haast Fellowship award from the Royal Society of New Zealand. With his research, Leuchs is contributing to the field of quantum technology. He is member of a number of advisory boards for quantum technology application and innovation in Germany and abroad. Over the years, he served on several Optica committees.