Leonid, a PhD student at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, was awarded an Eiffel excellence scholarship in order to pursue his studies at the Photonics department at XLIM. His research activities deal with the optimization of rare-earth-doped optical fibres and their use in high -power lasers. Last September, Leonid received the best student paper award at the international conference SPIE Security+Defence for his outstanding work on single-frequency all-fibre lasers.