Sergey Ponomarenko earned his Ph.D. degree in theoretical physics from the University of Rochester, USA under the tutelage of late Prof. Emil Wolf, a pioneer of optical coherence theory. After a prestigious Director’s postdoc at Los Alamos National Laboratory, USA, Dr. Ponomarenko joined the faculty of Dalhousie University, Canada in 2006, having been awarded a fiercely competitive Canada Research Chair. Prof. Ponomarenko had held his Canada Research Chair from 2006 to 2016. He has established a Theoretical Optics & Photonics (TOP) group at Dalhousie which has published over a 120 journal papers in leading peer reviewed journals in physics, optics, and photonics to date, including such prestigious and highly selective physics and photonics journals as Physical Review Letters and APL Photonics; several of TOP Optica journal publications have been selected as Editor's Picks. Prof. Ponomarenko is an Associate Editor of Frontiers in Physics and a member of numerous Editorial Boards, including that of Journal of the European Optical Society-Rapid Publications.