In 1987 he was a visiting scientist in the Applied Physics Department of Prof. D. Jaeger in Munster, Germany, where he worked on thermo-optically bistable Si and GaAs devices, workhorses for optical computing demonstrator experiments. In 1989 he was a visiting scientist at the "Philips Research Laboratories" Eindhoven, in the groups of Prof. Q.E.H. Vrehen and Prof. E. Meyer, where he studied the nonlinear optical behavior of conjugated polymers.
In 1990 he received the PhD degree in Applied Sciences for his work entitled: “Aspects of Optical Bistability in Nonlinear Resonators for Digital Light Control: between theory and technology”.

In 1993 he introduced, together with his colleagues, the new Electrical Engineering subdiscipline "Photonics" at the VUB. In 1994 he became Professor in the Faculty of Applied Sciences, with teaching responsibilities in 6 compulsory courses in this novel discipline.

Today he is research director of the "Laboratory for Photonics" at the VUB and is promoter or co-promoter of many research projects supported by FWO, IWT, DWTC and the European Community. Most of these projects are related to Micro-Optic and Photonic Interconnect Technologies in High Capacity Information Processing Systems.

He also manages several photonics-related industrial projects with Belgian companies like Barco, Agfa-Gevaert and Xeikon.

Hugo Thienpont has more than 200 publications in international conference proceedings or peer-reviewed journals and has been invited speaker at more than 20 international conferences. He has served as associate editor of SPIE’s journal 'Optical Engineering'. He was guest editor of several special journal issues and serves as referee for a.o. Optics Letters, Optics Communications, IEEE J. Lightwave Techn., Applied Optics, IEEE Phot. Techn. Lett.

He is a member of the board of the EOS and IEEE-LEOS Benelux and serves in technical program committees of different IEEE, OSA, SPIE, EOS and ICO meetings related to photonics. He organized and chaired, together with his international colleagues, the ICO topical meeting on "Optics in Computing '98" and the SPIE conferences on “Critical Technologies for the Future of Computing” and “Optical Interconnects”.
He is a member of IEEE-LEOS, SPIE, OSA and the EOS.

In 1999 Hugo received the International Commission for Optics Prize ICO 99 and the Ernst Abbe medal from Carl Zeiss for his noteworthy contributions in the field of photonics and parallel optics. Recently he was selected as LEOS distinguished lecturer for the period 2001-2002.