Prof. Dr. Laurent Schmalen was born in Luxembourg and received both his Dipl.-Ing. degree and his Dr.-Ing. (PhD) degree from RWTH Aachen University, Germany, in 2005 and 2011, respectively. Between 2011 and 2016, he was a research engineer in Alcatel- Lucent Bell Labs in Stuttgart, Germany, where he worked on forward error correction schemes for high-speed optical communications. Between 2016 and 2019 he was a department head in Nokia Bell Labs in Stuttgart Germany. He served as a guest lecturer at the University of Stuttgart between 2014 and 2019, teaching a graduate-level course on modern error correction techniques. Since 2019, he is a full, tenured professor at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) where he heads the communications engineering lab (CEL). Among others, he received the E-Plus award and the Friedrich-Wilhelm award for his PhD thesis, the Bell Labs president award and is a recipient of the best student paper award at the IEEE Signal Processing Systems (SiPS), the best paper award at the 2010 ITG conference on speech communications, and both the 2016 and 2018 Journal of Lightwave Technology best paper award, honoring the most influential, highest-cited original paper published in the journal in 2016 and 2018. Additionally, he received the 2014 IEEE Transactions of Communications exemplary reviewer award and the 2018 Journal of Lightwave Technology Outstanding Reviewer recognition. He is a recipient of a 2020 ERC Consolidator Grant. He is a senior member of the IEEE and serves as an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Communications. He currently serves in the OFC subcommittee S4.