Mr. Pavlos Maniotis, PhD candidate in the field of Optical Communications, has been awarded the very prestigious IEEE Photonics Society Graduate Student Fellowship 2017. This fellowship is annually awarded to 10 outstanding graduate students world-wide pursuing graduate education within the Society’s field of interest. The full-list of the 2017 winners is available online (http://www.photonicssociety.org/awards/graduate-student-fellowship/graduate-student-fellowship-award-winners) and the awards will be presented at the IEEE Photonics Conference 2017 in Florida, USA. Following the respective awards received by Dr. Christos Vagionas in 2016 and Dr. Dimitris Fitsios in 2014, this is the third time that a PhD student from the Photonics Systems and Networks (Phos-Net) Research Group (http://phos-net.csd.auth.gr/ ) from the Department of Informatics at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki receives this prestigious award and only the sixth time for a PhD student from a Greek University.