Student

During the summer of 2021 she worked as an intern at the Skinakas Observatory under the supervision of Dr. Reig. In 2022 she started working on her senior thesis with Dr. Reig studying the long term optical variability of Be/X-ray binaries. She also spend 5 months at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy as an intern where she worked on the project entitled: "Do all gaps in protoplanetary discs host planets?". In 2023 she started working for her master thesis studying the long-term polarimetric variability of Be/X-ray binaries in order to study the neutron star-disc connection.

During his undergraduate and MSc studies, he studied physical models for the spectral energy distribution of accretion discs in Active Galactic Nuclei. He completed his senior thesis entitled "The energy spectrum of accretion discs in AGN" and his MSc thesis titled: “Theoretical model fits to the optical/UV spectral energy distributions of AGN” under the supervision of Prof. I. Papadakis. For his Ph.D. studies, he is working on modeling the optical/UV and X-ray variability of AGN spectra.

In 2023 he joined the Institute of Astrophysics at FORTH, when he started working on his senior thesis concerning modeling the early phases of star formation under the supervision of Prof. Tassis.

In 2023 he joined the Institute of Astrophysics at FORTH, when he started working on his senior thesis concerning modeling the early phases of star formation under the supervision of Prof. Tassis.

During her school years she played competitive chess and has won several medals in Greek Youth Championships. In July 2023, she was awarded the "Stephanos Trachanas" scholarship for her academic excellence. The same month, she joined the Institute of Astrophysics at FORTH. She is currently working on topics related to star-formation under the supervision of Prof. Κ. Tassis. In 2024 she received the "George Grammatikakis Award" of the Department of Physics.

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.