Philip Russell, the inventor of photonic crystal fiber (PCF), will receive an honorary doctorate from Menéndez Pelayo International University next summer. Originally from Northern Ireland, Russell is director of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Germany and president of The Optical Society (OSA). Philip Russell. Courtesy of Menéndez Pelayo International University. Russell began developing PCFs three decades ago. Today, laboratories and research groups around world are exploring applications of PCFs in lasers, materials processing, nonlinear optics, medicine, photochemistry, telecommunications and astronomy. PCFs so far have had the greatest commercial impact in supercontinuum light sources. Russell is currently working on extremely bright sources of tunable deep and vacuum UV light for spectroscopy driven by ultrashort pulses of IR light, and based on gas-filled, hollow-core PCFs and solid-core fluorozirconate glass PCFs. He also works on short-pulse fiber lasers, which are self-stabilized by optoacoustic interactions in a very small PCF core, and on chiral solid-core PCFs to create vortex beams for manipulating small particles. Russell will receive his honorary degree during the International School on Light Sciences and Technologies to be held at Menéndez Pelayo International University in June. Expected to become an annual event, the International School in 2016 will focus on light in the life sciences and health.