Alain Aspect is a Director of Research at CNRS and a Professor at the Ecole Polytechnique, Palaiseau. After completing a series of experiments in the early 1980s on the foundations of quantum mechanics, he joined Claude Cohen-Tannoudji at the Ecole Normale Superieure to work on laser cooling of atoms. He is now head of the Atom Optics group of Institut d'Optique at Orsay and is the co-author of Introduction to Quantum Optics (Cambridge University Press, 2010).