PhD Student

During his last year of his undergraduate studies he worked on the hierarchical formation of intermediate mass black holes in globular clusters. During his master’s degree he developed an interest in accretion phenomena through X-ray observations and took part in an exchange program at the University of Groningen where he worked on the variability and phase-lags analysis of X-ray photons in low-mass X-ray binaries. His Ph.D. project focuses on the study of X-ray reverberation and time-lags in AGNs.

During his Bachelor studies, he worked on dispersion measure time series of the pulsars J0613–0200 and J1643–1224, under Indian Pulsar Timing Array (InPTA) collaboration. For his MSc thesis, he studied jet precession and variability in M81 using multi-epoch VLBA and EVN observations and led a radio flares monitoring campaign with the Effelsberg 100 m telescope. For his Ph.D. studies, he is working on energy-dependent power spectral densities (PSDs) of Active Galactic Nuclei.

During her undergraduate studies, she worked on modeling nonlinear phase transitions in the Early Dark Energy field. For her PhD, she is workin on characterising the effect of tensor fluctuations on CMB spectra and bispectra for a wide range of nonlinear inflationary scenarios. In Crete, she is exploring the statistics of cosmic structure formation with applications on turnaround-scale cosmology. She is a recipient of an Isaac Newton studentship at Cambridge, and was awarded both a Barry Goldwater scholarship and a Clare Boothe Luce scholarship during her undergraduate career, for her work in numerical cosmology.

As an undergraduate student he performed research at the Polarization Spectroscopy Lab of IESL/FORTH (2014-2015) and with the Astrophysics Group of the Dept. of Physics (2016-17). His PhD was on the instrumentation and software of the PASIPHAE project. Since 2025 he is a postdoctoral researcher with the BOOTES project. 

In her bachelor’s thesis she focused on diffusive shock acceleration in supernova remnants and in her master’s thesis “Investigating the multi-TeV emission of GRB 221009A” she investigated proton-induced cascade emissions in GRBs. In 2025, she joined the University of Crete and the Institute of Astrophysics (IA-FORTH) as a PhD student under the supervision of Prof. Vasiliki Pavlidou.

In February of 2023, he started working on his senior thesis under the supervision of Prof. Iossif Papadakis, entitled "UV and optical cross correlation studies of AGN at different time-scales". The objective of his thesis was to quantitatively study the long timescale variations in Active Galactic Nuclei. His MSc degree was also under the supervision of Prof. Papadakis and it was entitled Study of the optical/UV time lags in quasars.

Both her MS and BS thesis (respectively entitled “Mitigating unbalanced training sets for machine learning: generation of synthetic SEDs for the selection of high-redshift quasar” and “Study of time dependence of Planck-LFI detector properties”) were carried out in collaboration with INAF. Her PhD project will be focused on polarisation of blazar emission, with observations carried out at the Skinakas Observatory.

In March 2022 he started to work on quasar observations at the Asiago Astrophysical Observatory, and in February 2023 he started working on his Master thesis titled "Chemical abundances along the Quasar Main Sequence". After graduation he was invited as a visiting researcher at the Center for Theoretical Physics in Warsaw to build a model for FeII emission in quasars. He joined the Department of Physics of the University of Crete and the Institute of Astrophysics in October 2024 as a PhD student under the supervision of Dr. Yannis Liodakis.

In A.A. 19/20, he was awarded an Erasmus+ scholarship for studies in Università di Padova, taking the opportunity to follow courses in e.g. Machine learning and Particle physics. His Master's thesis work relied on simulations on supercomputers at the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing partly funded through the Swedish Research Council grant agreement No. 2016-07213, and regarded the effects of Fermi-like acceleration of neutrinos in the ejecta surrounding CCSNe. He joined IA as a software engineer in May 2024 and commenced his PhD in November 2024.