Bernard has been involved in Optics and Photonics for the past 25 years as an associate professor, researcher, engineering director, starting in academia before moving to entrepreneurship, eventually working in large multinational corporations. He worked on product developments in the fields of optical computing, optical telecom, optical data storage, optical anti-counterfeiting, industrial optical sensors and more recently in immersive displays for augmented and mixed reality systems. Bernard published several books, is listed as principal inventor on close to 120 patents worldwide and wrote a few hundred papers on these topics.

He is the 2023 President of the International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE) and chairs various SPIE conferences including the SPIE AR/VR/MR co-located with Photonics West and the SPIE Digital Optical Technologies co-located with Laser Munich. He is a short course instructor on micro-optics and ARVR displays and hosts the monthly online SPIE AR|VR|MR fireside chats.

Bernard held positions at Google [X] Labs since 2010 (Google Glass), Microsoft since 2015 (HoloLens). He is since 2021 the Director for XR engineering at Google in Mountain View, CA.