Prof. José Azaña was born in Toledo, Spain. He received the Telecommunication Engineer degree (six years engineering program) and a Ph.D. (doctoral) degree in telecommunication engineering from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), Spain, in 1997 and 2001, respectively. He completed part of his PhD research at the University of Toronto, ON, Canada (1999) and the University of California, Davis, CA, USA (2000). From September 2001 to mid 2003 he worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at McGill University Montreal, QC, Canada.

In 2003, he was appointed as an Assistant Professor at the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique – Centre Energie, Matériaux et Télécommunications (INRS-EMT) in the Montreal region. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2006 and to Full Professor in 2010. His research activities are focused on the areas of optics, photonics and microwave engineering.