Applied Photonics Group (APG) is a multidisciplinary Research Group, recognized as outstanding by Basque Science System with stable financing from Basque, Spanish Ministries and European Projects. The core of APG is comformed by physicists, but there are also mathematicians, telecommunication, electrical and mechanical engineers, biochemicals... just to name a few.

Nowadays, APG collaborates with prestigious Research Groups of the international scientific Plastic Optical Fiber (POF) community and fiber optic community in general. In addition, part of our research work is being carried out in cooperation with several techological centres and companies in order to develop prototypes for industrial applications based on optical sensors or requiring them, such as aircraft monitoring, for example. Our research projects and activities require a well equipped laboratory, which was created and it is being improved thanks to finantial support from our local institutions and from the European ones.

APG Research Group has at present 20 Ph.D.s and 6 Ph.D. students working in different areas:

• Manufacture of microstrutured plastic optical fibers
• Manufacture of active fiber optics
• Interferometric fiber optic sensors based on Fabry Perot cavities and modal coupling for detection of chemical, biological and physical parameters.
• Microfluidic Raman systems and hydrogels
• Fiber optic sensors for aeronautical applications and structural health and turbine monitoring.

The group leader is Prof. Joseba Zubia. and the leaders of the aforementioned research lines are Prof. Joel Villatoro, Prof. David Novoa and Prof. Asun Illarramendi.

The leader of APG, Prof. Joseba Zubia, started his research activities in the current field (Polymer Optical Fibres and Applied Photonics) in 1993 as a supervisor of a Ph.D. thesis. Since then, an ever growing research team coordinated by him has been carrying out an extensive research on the characteristics, possible applications and optimization of new types of POFs and related optical devices, such as POF-based optical amplifiers, lasers and sensors.