Research Fellow

The research of Takis Kontos is mainly based on the implementation of hybrid quantum circuits, aiming to reveal new states of matter or to exploit quantum mechanical properties of circuits. During his thesis at CSNSM, Orsay, France, he studied the interplay of superconductivity and ferromagnetism in multilayers of superconductors and ferromagnetic alloys together with Marco Aprili and Jérôme Lesueur. He moved as a postdoctoral researcher to the University of Basel, Switzerland, in the group of Prof. Christian Schönenberger, where he studied spin transport in carbon nanotubes. Since 2005, he has been permanent CNRS researcher at LPENS, Ecole Normale Supérieure, first as a research associate and, since 2013, as a research director. In collaboration with Audrey Cottet for the theoretical aspects, his research has focused on the implementation of a circuit quantum electrodynamics architecture with carbon nanotubes for which he was awarded an ERC CoG in 2013 (project “CirQys”). He could shed new light on fundamental aspects of condensed matter such as the Kondo effect. He could also develop a synthetic spin-photon interface for single spins trapped in carbon nanotubes. The latter work is at the basis of the technology used by the “quantum” start-up C12 Quantum electronics, which Takis Kontos co-founded in 2020. Takis Kontos is now focusing on the use of quantum sensing techniques with circuits in order to test dark matter paradigms such as axions or to measure radioastronomical signals such as the 21 cm hydrogen line. For the dark matter quantum sensing project, he has been awarded an ERC SyG in 2023 (project “Dark Quantum”). He joined IA-FORTH as a Research Fellow in 2025.

Between 2017-2020, she worked as a NANOGrav (North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves) fellow in the TAPIR group at Caltech. From 2020-2023, she was a VIDA (Vanderbilt Initiative for Data-intensive Astrophysics) fellow at Vanderbilt University and subsequently she joined the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Washington State University as an assistant professor. She is a member of the NANOGrav Collaboration, the International Pulsar Timing Array, the LISA Consortium and the LSST AGN Science Collaboration. In 2023, she was awarded an ERC Starting Grant entitled "MMMonsters: The first multi-messenger detection of a supermassive black hole binary" and she joined IA-FORTH as a research fellow. In 2024 she was the recipient of the “L’Oreal-UNESCO Award for women in science”.

He spend 5 years (1979-1984) at the Royal Observatory Edinburgh before moving to the Institute of Astronomy at the Univ. of Cambridge, where in 2000 he became Professor of Experimental Philosophy, FRS. He has been Scientific Coordinator of Opticon, the EC Optical Infrared Coordination Committee for Astronomy and more recently the Opticon-Radionet-Pilot. He is the UK PI of the Gaia data processing and analysis consortium; Co-PI of the Gaia-ESO Public Spectroscopic Survey. For his research he was also awarded an ERC Advanced Grant. Professor Gilmore has received numerous awards and recognitions for his contributions to astrophysics including: Fellow of the Royal Society (2013), Fellow of Academia Europaea and Institute of Physics, Honorary Fellow of Royal Astronomical Society NZ (2016), recipient of the Chalonge Medal (2013) and the De Vega medal (2015). As of 2023 he is Emeritus Professor of Experimental Philosophy.

In 2023 he was elected as lifetime Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Astrophysics - FORTH.

After a brief postdoctoral appointment at ESO, he joined CEA-Saclay in 1993 as a tenure researcher. Over the years he has been a frequent long term visitor of several institutions including ESO, UCLA, Stanford, the Flatiron Institute, and FORTH. In 2010 he founded and has been leading since, the “CosmoStat Lab” at CEA, an interdisciplinary research group, currently having 16 researchers. His group is performing cutting edge research at the interface between astrophysics, cosmology and statistics, with strong interests in applications for space missions, as well as developing close industry-academia partnerships. He has received the EADS prize of the French Academy of Science in 2011, as well as the 2018 Gruber Prize in Cosmology (as a member of the ESA Planck team) and the Tycho Brahe Medal of the European Astronomical Society in 2022. He is also member of Academia Europae (since 2021). Over the last 10 years, he has been awarded as Co-I or PI ~11MEuros in competitive research funding including an Advanced ERC. He has published over 300 refereed papers in astrophysics, cosmology, signal processing and applied mathematics, which have received more than 98,000 citations (source Google Scholar), and he is also author of three books.

In 2022 he was awarded a highly competitive ERA Chair in "Astroinformatics", in collaboration with the Institute of Computer Science and the Institute of Astrophysics and the Board of Directors of FORTH named him an "Honorary FORTH Fellow".

Between 2013-2016 he worked as an Enrico Fermi Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Astronomy at the University of Chicago and the FLASH Center for Computational Science until he joined the Department of Physics & Astronomy at Louisiana State University in 2016 at the rank of Assistant Professor and was promoted to Associated professor in 2022. He joined IA-FORTH as research fellow in 2021.

He joined California Institute of Technology as a Research Fellow (1974-75) continuing as Senior Research Fellow (1976-79) and then  Research Associate, 1979-81. He became  Professor of Radio Astronomy in 1981 and Professor of Astronomy from1990 to 2000. He was Rawn Professor, 2000-13 and then Robinson Professor, 2013-15. Since 2015 his is  Robinson Professor, Emeritus. Professor Readhead served in various administrative positions including Director, of the Owens Valley Radio Observatory, 1981-86, 2007-18,  Executive Officer for Astronomy, 1990-92, 2012-13; Director of Chajnantor Observatory, 2006-2011 and  Jet Propulsion Laboratory Senior Research Scientist, 2006-15. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

Professor Readhead was elected as the first Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Astrophysics - FORTH in 2021.

During the last part of his thesis (1997-1998) he was a visiting fellow at the California Institute of Technology  (USA). He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Astronomy of Cambridge University (UK) for the period 1998-2000 before joining the staff of the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) at Pune (India). Since 2010 he is a Professor (Scientist G) at IUCAA, where he heads the instrumentation laboratory. He holds several adjunct faculty appointments in Indias as well as a Visiting Associate Faculty at Caltech (since 2015). He joined IA-FORTH as a Research Fellow in 2019. Prof. Ramaprakash has co-/supervised over 20 PhD students and postdocs.

He worked as a postdoctoral scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, the Space Telescope Science Institute, and the University of California, Berkeley. In 2006, he became an Adjunct Professor of Astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. He joined IA-FORTH as research fellow in 2019.