Roel Baets is a full professor at Ghent University (UGent) in Belgium. He is also associated with imec. He holds academic and managerial responsibilities within the Photonics Research Group of UGent, the Center for Nano- and Biophotonics (NB Photonics) of UGent and the joint UGent-imec research program on silicon photonics. Baets received an MSc degree in Electrical Engineering from Ghent University in 1980 and a second MSc degree from Stanford University in 1981, with a focus on biomedical engineering.

He returned to Ghent University for doctoral research focused on semiconductor lasers, which he completed in 1984. From 1984 till 1989 he held a postdoctoral position at imec. Since 1989, he has been a professor in the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture at UGent where he founded the Photonics Research Group. From 1990 till 1994, he has also been a part-time professor at Delft University of Technology and from 2004 till 2008 at Eindhoven University of Technology. 

Baets has mainly worked in the field of integrated photonic components. He has made contributions to research on photonic integrated circuits, both in III-V semiconductors and in silicon, as well as their applications in telecom, datacom, sensing, biosensing and medical devices. As part of a team of 8 professors, he leads the Photonics Research Group at UGent, a group of about 90 researchers. The activities of this team have led to high impact research achievements and to four spin-off companies.

In recent years, his research has mainly focused on nonlinear optics, spectroscopic sensing, and biomedical devices based on silicon or silicon nitride photonic integrated circuit platforms.

Baets received the John Tyndall Award in 2002 "for seminal research in silicon photonics aand for driving the foundry model in this field."