Filip Beunis is professor at the ELIS Department of the Faculty of Engineering of Ghent University (Belgium), and affiliated to the Center for Nano- and Biophotonics. He has worked in research on optical tweezers, electrophoretic displays, electrokinetics in nonpolar and polar colloids, and ion transport in liquid crystals. His main current research interest is in the combination of electrokinetics with optical manipulation techniques to study colloidal and biological systems
Filip Beunis was born in Antwerp, in 1978. In 2002 he received a degree in electronic engineering at the Faculty of Engineering at Ghent University. After a short period as a member of the Solar Cells group at ELIS (supervised by Professor Alex De Vos), he joined the Liquid Crystals and Photonics group of Professor Kristiaan Neyts in 2003. On May 29th 2008, he successfully defended his PhD thesis in public and earned the title of Doctor of Engineering Physics. The topic of the doctoral thesis is "Electric Currents in Nonpolar Liquids with Surfactants". Before becoming a professor in the LCP group in October 2011, Filip Beunis was postdoctoral fellow at Ghent University between 2008 and 2011, and vistiting scientist at ICFO-The Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona (Spain) in the Optical Tweezers group of Professor Dmitri Petrov, where he combined electrophoresis and optical trapping to study colloidal and biological systems. He is funded by the Special Research Fund (BOF) of Ghent University.