PhD Student

He worked on his Master's thesis titled "Dissecting the information content in the large-scale structures of the Universe using machine learning" under the supervision of Dr. Francisco Villaescusa-Navarro of the Flatiron Institute, New York, USA, where he investigated the scales and morphological features of the cosmic web from large-scale simulations to understand the origins of the cosmological information extracted by neural networks. For his PhD, he will be working on the topic "Morphology and Spatial Distribution of the Dust Emission using Deep Learning Methods" at FORTH with a strong collaboration with the CosmoStat Laboratory at CEA Paris-Saclay, as part of the TITAN project.

Evangelia Vaikousi completed the MSc in Astrophysics program of the Bonn-Cologne Graduate School of Physics and Astronomy (BCGS) in collaboration with the University of Crete, where she carried out her Master’s thesis, which concerned the study of outbursts in Galactic Be/X-ray binaries, and was performed under the supervision of Prof. Andreas Zezas. She joined the Department of Physics of the University of Crete and the Institute of Astrophysics - FORTH as a PhD student in 2023 in order to work on the understanding of the properties and the evolution of the Be/X-ray binaries.

During his undergraduate studies, he worked on Cosmic-ray phenomenology and completed his senior thesis entitled “Cosmic-ray air-shower simulations across the ankle: Combining mixed Galactic composition with new physics above 50 TeV”, under the supervision of Prof. V. Pavlidou. He also worked with Professor E. Kiritsis on a project on “Holographic RG flows on deformed 3-sphere”. For his MSc, he worked in weak-lensing cosmology, completing his MSc thesis entitled “Comparison of mass-mapping techniques using weak gravitational lensing. Application to the UNIONS galaxy survey”, under the supervision of Dr. J.L. Starck and Prof. V. Pavlidou. For his PhD studies, he is working on developing data-driven approaches for the reconstruction of weak-lensing mass maps and the analysis of large-scale datasets, including ones acquired by the Euclid satellite, as a member of the TITAN project.

In 2018, he was an intern at RAD@home Astronomy Collaboratory developing interest in Radio and AGN; In 2021 he joined as a Junior Research Fellow for the UC Berkeley SETI-Amity project to do Imaging using uGMRT funded by Breakthrough Listen Initiative; In 2022 he worked as a Senior Project Associate funded by ISRO for the ISRO-ARIES Collaboration on the Aditya-L1 Project(AL1SC); Since April 2023 he is at the Institute of Astrophysics (IA-FORTH) as a PhD student under the supervision of Dr Carolina Casadio in the SMILE group.

During his undergraduate and postgraduate studies he studied the various mechanisms of galaxy activity. He developed diagnostics for galactic activity in the optical and infrared part of the spectrum, utilizing machine learning methods. He collaborates with Professor Andreas Zezas in the study of the evolution of galaxies and the application of machine learning methods in Astrophysics. In May 2022 he commenced a studentship at the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard University (USA).

In 2021 he was awarded with a JAE Intro SOMdM scholarship to complete his master thesis “On the inpainting of incomplete CMB sky maps” at the Instituto de Física de Cantabria (IFCA). Since December 2022 he is a PhD student at the University of Crete and IA-FORTH under the supervision of Dr. Carolina Casadio.

In 2019, she was an intern at the University of Cardiff and, in 2021, she won a scholarship “Scaling relations in nearby galaxies: the interplay of stars, dust and gas” at the Università degli Studi di Padova” (Italy). She joined the Department of Physics of the University of Crete and the Institute of Astrophysics (IA-FORTH) in November 2022 as a PhD student under the supervision of Dr. Tanio Diaz Santos.

The last year of her undergraduate studies she collaborated with the research group of Prof. George Tsironis, in the project of chaotic timeseries prediction using Recurrent Neural Networks. Her master’s thesis with title “Modeling of Speech Signals using Recurrent Neural Networks”, was completed under the supervision of Dr. Yannis Pantazis. During the same period she also collaborated with Prof. Vasiliki Pavlidou on the analysis of optopolarimetric observations with statistical and Machine Learning tools. The title of her PhD thesis is "Computational Intelligence for Multimodal Astrophysical Tomography" and it is part of the project "Polar", and it is part of the ongoing collaboration between FORTH and the Univ. of Cambridge under the auspices of GAPSTI.

At the Univ. of Athens she completed her undergraduate thesis, entitled "Spectroscopic study of Solar System bodies in optical wavelengths" (in greek) in order to detect molecular compounds in their atmospheres. After completing her Master Thesis entitled "Study of the impact of interstellar cloud shapes on CMB polarization foregrounds", she commenced her PhD on realistic simulations of the magnetic fields in galaxies.

Savvas Chanlaridis moved back to Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 2020 as a guest researcher in the group of Prof. Dr. Nikolaos Stergioulas where he studied the effect of stellar wind on the evolution of low-mass helium stars. In 2021 he joined the Dept. of Physics of the University of Crete and the Institute of Astrophysics - FORTH as a PhD student in order to work on the understanding of the mass spectrum of neutron stars under the supervision of Dr. John Antoniadis.