Kosmas L. Tsakmakidis obtained his Diploma degree in Electrical & Computer Engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece (2002), his Master of Research (MRes) in Electronic Engineering from the 5*A-ranked Advanced Technology Institute (ATI) of the University of Surrey, UK (2003), and his Doctorate degree (PhD) in Applied Physics and Engineering from ATI, University of Surrey (2009).
During 2008-2013 he was a Royal Academy of Engineering/EPSRC research fellow, first at the ATI, University of Surrey (2008-2010), and then in the Condensed Matter Theory Group, Department of Physics, of Imperial College London (2011-2013). He subsequently worked as a senior postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the University of California, Berkeley (2014-2015), a Eugen Lommel postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck – University of Ottawa Center for Extreme and Quantum Photonics & the Department of Physics, University of Ottawa (Canada, 2015-2016), and as an EPFL Fellow in the Bioengineering Department, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne (Switzerland, 2017-2018). Since March 2018 he is an assistant professor (tenured since Nov. 2021) in the Department of Physics, Section of Condensed Matter Physics, of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA), Greece.
He specializes in condensed matter photonics, nanophotonics, topological photonics, metamaterials, plasmonics, ‘slow’ and ‘fast’ light (see a 2012 video), active/lasing nanostructurers, computational physics, invisibility cloaking, and light-based chiral sensing schemes, where he has made a number of seminal contributions and introduced key concepts and results in the fields [e.g., K. L. Tsakmakidis, et al., Nature 450, 397 (2007); K. L. Tsakmakidis, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 167401 (2014); K. L. Tsakmakidis, et al., Science 356, 1260 (2017); K. L. Tsakmakidis, et al., Science 358, eaan5196 (2017)]. He is the originator of the broad, multidisciplinary applied-physics research topic known as the ‘rainbow effect,’ referring to broadband slow/stopped & spatially demultiplexed waves. For his work, he has received awards by the Royal Academy of Engineering (UK, 2008), the Institute of Physics (best PhD Thesis prize, 2010), the UK Parliament (2010), the University of Surrey (Researcher of the Year, 2010), the Academy of Athens (Lycurgus Award, 2021), and the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (2023) [1, 2]. His work is often covered by physics-dedicated and general-media outlets (e.g., APS Physics, Physics World, Physics Today, BBC, The Economist).
Evangelos Almpanis was born on 3 Mar. 1984 at Athens, Greece. He received his Diploma on "Applied Mathematical and Physical Sciences" from National Technical University of Athens on Sep. 2007 and his M.Sc. degree on "Physics and Technological applications" on Jun. 2009. He obtained a 4-year PhD scholarship from National Centre of Scientific Research "DEMOKRITOS" (former Institute of Microelectronics) and attained his PhD, entitled "Photonic structures for the efficient control of electromagnetic waves in the nanoscale", from School of Applied Mathematical and Physical Sciences, National Technical University of Athens. During 2015-16 he worked as a post-doc researcher funded from the States Scholarships Foundation (IKY Fellowships of Excellence – Siemens Program) in collaboration with National Technical University of Athens on magnetoplasmonic metasurfaces. During 2017 he received another scholarship from IKY to work in INN NCSR "DEMOKRITOS" on photomagnonic nanostructures. From Feb. 2018 to Feb. 2019 he worked as a Research Associate in INN NCSR "DEMOKRITOS". At the present time he works as a post-doc researcher in the Physics Department - University of Athens, in the ELIDEK project “Quantum Topological Nanophotonics.”
Grigorios P. Zouros was born in Lefkada, Ionian Islands, Greece, in 1982. He received the Electrical and Computer Engineering degree and the Dr. Eng. degree from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Athens, Greece, in 2008 and 2012, respectively.
From 2008 to 2012, he was a Teaching Assistant with the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, NTUA. From 2009 to 2013, he was a Laboratory Instructor with the Laboratory of Automatic Control Systems, School of Pedagogical and Technological Education (ASPETE), Athens, Greece. From 2010 to 2011, he was a Visiting Researcher with the Delft Institute of Applied Mathematics, Delft University of Technology (TUDELFT), Delft, The Netherlands. From 2013 to 2014, he fulfilled his military service at the Corps of Research and Computer Science. Since 2012, he has been a Post-Doctoral Researcher with the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, NTUA. Since 2015, he has been a Laboratory Instructor with the Laboratory of Power Electronics, ASPETE. His current research interests include the propagation and scattering of electromagnetic waves in anisotropic and nano-scale configurations, microwave cavities, and fast solvers for the electromagnetic scattering by inhomogeneous anisotropic 3-D objects.
Dr. Zouros served as an expert of the Romanian UEFISCDI Executive Agency in 2011. He was a recipient of the Young Scientist Award of the international conference on Mathematical Methods in Electromagnetic Theory (MMET) in 2010, the IEEE Student Paper Contest Award of the IEEE Applied Electromagnetics Conference (AEMC) and the IEEE Indian Antenna Week (IAW) in 2011, and a candidate for the 2016 R. W. P. King Award of the IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation. He was a session chair of the IEEE MTT-S international conference NEMO 2017. He was awarded a postgraduate fellowship of excellence (Siemens program) from the Greek State Scholarships Foundation (IKY) in 2017. He was a TPC member of the IEEE international conference MMET 2018, of the IEEE international conference on Microwaves, Communications, Antennas and Electronic Systems (COMCAS) 2019, and the organizer of a special session on nano-scale modeling in IEEE COMCAS 2019. He is an IEEE Senior member.
Vicky Kyrimi obtained her Diploma and Master degrees in Physics from the University of Patras, Greece, in 2008 and 2011 respectively. She subsequently worked as a research team member funded by the European union's Seventh Framework Program NANOGOLD, 'Self-organised nanomaterials for tailored optical and electrical properties' , in the Department of Materials Science, University of Patras. In 2016 she obtained her second Master degree in Neuro-informatics from the same University, and in 2021 she obtained her Doctorate degree from the University of Exeter, United Kingdom. During 2021-2022 she worked as post-doctoral researcher at ENSTA-Paris, France, in the project 'Homogenisation of metasurfaces/metafilms', and in 2023 she joined the group of Prof. Tsakmakidis, Department of Physics, University of Athens, as a post-doctoral researcher in the ELIDEK project ‘Quantum Topological Nanophotonics’. Her PhD thesis entitled ‘Acoustic and Phononic Metamaterials for Surface Waves', as well as her published work, can be found in the following link: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Vicky-Kyrimi.
Born in Sparta, Greece, Konstantinos G. Baskourelos obtained his Diploma on Mechanical Engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (School of Mechanical Engineering) in 2004, his M.Sc. degree in Computational Physics and his PhD in Computational Electromagnetics from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (School of Physics) in 2006 and 2012 respectively. He also obtained an M.Sc. in Computational Mechanics from the National Technical University of Athens on 2015. He specializes in numerical methods in Electromagnetics and Mechanics, specifically the Method of Moments, the Finite Element Method and the Boundary Element Method. His interests include Computational Physics, Numerical Analysis, scientific programming and Mathematical Physics.
Iridanos Loulas was born in Athens, Greece. He received his Bachelor in Physics and Masters degree in Solid State Physics from the Physics Department of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in 2015 and 2017, respectively. In 2020 he obtained his second Masters degree in Data Science and Machine Learning from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens. His current research interests are Quantum Topological Nanophotonics, Invisibility Cloaking, and Deep Neural Networks.
Savvas Papamakarios is a PhD candidate in the Department of Physics of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA), and also a member of the Non-Linear Lithography group at FORTH/IESL. He received his bachelor's degree from the Department of Physics, NKUA, in 2021, focusing on computational electrodynamics using the Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) method, for the study of metamaterials, under the supervision of Prof. Kosmas Tsakmakidis. He subsequently received his Master's degree in “Photonics and Nanoelectronics” from FORTH/IESL, in 2023. He has also joined the research group of Dr. Maria Farsari at FORTH/IESL in 2022, focusing on the development and fabrication of electromagnetic metamaterials using multiphoton polymerization, as well as on electroless metal plating research under the supervision of Dr. Maria Farsari and Prof. Maria Kafesaki.
