Alain Aspect is a Distinguished Senior Researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). In the early 1980s, with collaborators in France, he performed the crucial "Bell test experiments" that showed that quantum mechanics’ 'ghostly action at a distance', did in fact appear to be realized when two particles were separated by an arbitrarily large distance. He was deputy director of the French "grande école" SupOptique until 1994. He is a member of the French Academy of Sciences and French Academy of Technologies, and he was recently awarded the gold medal of the CNRS. His current research is in atom optics, including atom lasers and atom mirrors.