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Pierre Yves Bely is a French-American engineer specializing in the design and construction of large astronomical optical telescopes. He was Chief Engineer for the Canada-France-Hawaii (CFH) Telescope and worked on the Hubble Space Telescope and the design of its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope. He also participated in the design of a number of proposed astronomical instruments in space or balloon-borne.

Education
Bely was born in France in 1937. He graduated in 1961 from the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures in Paris, which trains multidisciplinary engineers. Ranking among the first of his class, he was awarded a French government scholarship and a Fulbright grant for a year of specialization in ocean engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, where he obtained an M.S. in Engineering in 1962.

Career
Bely did his military service in the French Navy where he served as an engineer in the design and construction of submarines at DCAN Cherbourg (now part of Naval Group). On returning to the U.S. in 1964 he became an associate engineer at the International Engineering Company (IECO) in San Francisco where for several years he worked on large civil engineering projects, primarily for the World Bank. After a used copy of The Nature of the Universe by Fred Hoyle fell into his hands, he became excited about astronomy and decided to change careers, took a few classes in astronomy at Berkeley and, in 1968, obtained a position as Project Engineer at the Institut National d’Astronomie et Géophysique (INAG) at the Paris-Meudon Laboratory. There he was in charge of the design and construction of a 1.5-meter Schmidt telescope, the largest of this kind in Europe, which was installed at the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur near Nice (1), and of a 3.6-meter telescope, the largest for France at the time (2,3).