Vasiliki Pavidou obtained her BSc in Physics at the University of Thessaloniki in 1999 and her PhD in Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (USA) in 2005. Her academic genealogy tree is here.
Career :
She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Cosmological Physics of the University of Chicago (2005-2008) and an Einstein fellow at Caltech (2008-2011). During the 2011-2012 year she was a visiting scientist at the Max-Planck Institute for Radioastronomy. She was elected as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Physics in 2010 and she joined the Department in the fall of 2012. In 2014 she was the recipient of the “L’Oreal-UNESCO Award for women in science”. She was promoted to an Associate Professor in 2018 and to a Professor in 2023. Since June 2021 she is the Deputy Director of the Institute of Astrophysics, FORTH. In June 2023 she was also elected Associate Editor in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. In 2024 she was awarded an ERC Synergy grant entitled "MW-Atlas" to create the first three-dimensional, comprehensive atlas of our Milky Way galaxy.
Interests :
High-energy astrophysics, Cosmology, cosmic-ray and gamma-ray astrophysics, optopolarimetry of high-energy sources, magnetic fields in the Milky Way and extragalactic environments, radioastronomy, dark matter, dark energy, probing particle physics with astrophysics and cosmic rays.