The OSA Foundation and Coherent, Inc., are pleased to announce Bowen Li, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado, Boulder, USA, as the 2021 Bernard J. Couillaud Prize winner. Li’s winning proposal focuses on the first counter-propagating all-normal dispersion (CANDi) fiber laser, a next-generation dual-comb laser source that generates two frequency combs with unprecedented pulse energies from a single fiber laser cavity.