Roy graduated from the Queen’s University of Belfast with a 1st class honours in physics in 1971 and commenced a PhD under the supervision of Professor Dan Bradley. In 1973 he transferred to Imperial College and submitted his PhD thesis, “Studies of tunable picosecond laser pulses and nonlinear interactions” to the Queen’s University in 1974. From 1975 to 1976 he was a post-doctoral research assistant in the Institute of Physical Chemistry at the Technical University in Munich. He returned in 1977 to the Optics Section at Imperial and in 1986 he established the Femtosecond Optics Group, which he ran as a research assistant until 2002, when he appeared to be promoted to Professor of Ultrafast Physics and Technology, having by that stage solely supervised more than 35 successful PhD students. Roy’s interests are in the generation and application of ultrashort pulses to fundamental nonlinear processes, primarily optical fibre based currently, but with the objective of making temporally and spectrally versatile systems of commercial interest and diverse application. The group have an established reputation for extensive industrial interaction and Roy’s many contributions have been recognized by the Ernst Abbé Award of the Carl Zeiss Foundation, the Thomas Young Medal of the Institute of Physics and the Rumford Medal of the Royal Society.