StockerYale Inc. announced the appointment of Sylvain Rioux as director of research & development for its laser business unit. Based out of the Montreal facility, Rioux will be responsible for managing all on-going R&D projects of StockerYale Canada. Rioux brings more than 15 years experience in R&D, product engineering and photonics to his new position. Most recently, he was in charge of the R&D team at Roctest Ltd., a manufacturer of monitoring equipment for civil engineering structures and fiber optic sensors. He has also managed the product engineering department at Exfo Inc., a maker of optical fiber test equipment for telecommunications; and worked as a chief engineer and R&D leader at Lasiris Inc. prior to its 1998 acquisition by StockerYale. Based in Salem, N.H., StockerYale manufactures structured light lasers, LED modules and specialty optical fibers for OEMs in the machine vision, industrial inspection, defense, telecommunication, sensors and medical markets.