Student

Student

Mastorakis

MihalisMastorakis
Education

Michalis Mastorakis graduated from the Neas Kydonias' high school that is located in Kato Daratsos, Chania in 2018. The same year he started his undergraduate studies in the Department of Physics of the University of Crete.
 

Career

In September 2021 he started working on his senior thesis under the supervision of Professor Vasiliki Paulidou and her graduate student Stelio Romanopoulo on Backtracking of ultra-high-energy cosmic-rays through the Galaxy’s magnetic field in order to determine their sources and their composition.

Interests

Cosmology, Theoretical Astrophysics, High Energy Astrophysics, Neutron Stars.

Email
Affiliation
Name
Michalis
Supervisor
Pavlidou
Past Member
On
Student Category
Director
Off
Starting Year
2021
Ending Year
2022
Departure Date
Female
Off

Litos

ChristosLitos
Education

Christos Litos graduated from the 2nd high school of Naousa, Imathia in 2018. In the same year, he joined the Department of Physics of the University of Crete as an undergraduate student.

Career

In the August of 2020, he started working on his senior thesis with Prof. Elias Kiritsis entitled "Holographic Theories defined on a squashed 3 dimensional sphere". In 2021, he started working with Prof. Vasiliki Pavlidou on the study of phenomena beyond the standard model of particle physics that are detected through interactions of Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays with the atmosphere.

Interests

Cosmology, Particle Physics, High Energy Astrophysics, String Theory with special interests in the Holographic Correspondence.

Email
Affiliation
Name
Christos
Supervisor
Pavlidou
Past Member
On
Moved to Institute
Dept. of Physics, Univ. of Florida (USA) - PhD student
Student Category
Director
Off
Starting Year
2021
Ending Year
2022
Departure Date
Female
Off

Tzouvanou

AnastasiaTzouvanou
Education

Anastasia Tzouvanou graduated from the 3nd high school of Arta in 2018 with a grade of 19.4/20  (‘Excellent’). The same year she started her undergraduate studies in the Department of Physics at the University of Crete.

Career

During the summer of 2021 she worked as an intern at Skinakas Observatory under the supervision of Dr. Reig. In 2022 she started working on her senior thesis with Dr. Reig studying the variability in Be/X-ray binaries. 

Interests

Observational Astrophysics, X-ray Binaries. 

Email
Affiliation
Name
Anastasia
Supervisor
Reig
Past Member
On
Moved to Institute
Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg (Germany) - Internship
Last known position
Dept. of Physics, Univ. of Crete & IA/FORTH - MSc student
Student Category
Director
Off
Starting Year
2022
Ending Year
2022
Departure Date
Female
On

Kotoulas

Kotoulas
Education

Panagiotis Kotoulas graduated from the Music School of Karditsa in 2019 with a grade of 19.8/20.0 (‘Excellent’). The same year he started his undergraduate studies in the Department of Physics of the University of Crete. 

Career

During the summer of 2021 he was an intern at FORTH’s Institute of Astrophysics. One year later, he officially became a member of the Institute when he started working on his senior thesis under the supervision of Prof. Andreas Zezas concerning star clusters and X-ray binaries of NGC2276.

Interests

Star clusters, X-ray binaries, Machine Learning Applications in Astrophysics, Theoretical Astrophysics

Email
Affiliation
Name
Panagiotis
Supervisor
Zezas
Past Member
On
Student Category
Director
Off
Starting Year
2021
Ending Year
2023
Departure Date
Female
Off

Koutsikos

ThomasKoutsikos
Education

Thomas Koutsikos graduated from the Music School of Larisa in 2019 with a grade of 19.8/20.0 (‘Excellent’). The same year he started his undergraduate studies in the Department of Physics of the University of Crete.

Career

During the summer of 2021 he was an intern at FORTH’s Institute of Astrophysics. One year later, he officially became a member of the Institute when he started working on a research project under the supervision of Prof. Andreas Zezas concerning sub-galactic scaling relations between X-ray binaries and stellar population parameters.

Interests

Cosmology, Astrophysics

Email
Affiliation
Name
Thomas
Supervisor
Zezas
Past Member
On
Moved to Institute
Perimeter Institute, Canada - Graduate student
Student Category
Director
Off
Starting Year
2021
Ending Year
2023
Departure Date
Female
Off

Kalaitzidakis

GiorgosKalaitzidakis
Education

George Kalaitzidakis graduated from the Experimental High School of the University of Crete in Rethymno in 2018 with a grade of 19.5/20 (‘Excellent’). The same year he started his undergraduate studies in the Department of Physics at the University of Crete. 

Career

In 2019, under the supervision of Prof. Vasiliki Pavlidou, he participated in the “SMILE: Search for Milli-Lenses” project, and became an official member of the project in 2021. The same year he started working, under the supervision of Dr. Casadio Carolina, on his senior thesis concerning the study of a sample of compact radio loud sources using VLBI radio data in search of strong gravitational lens systems that could account for Dark Matter halo candidates. 

Interests

Extragalactic astrophysics, Active galactic nuclei, Strong gravitational lensing,  Radio and mm-VLBI interferometry

Email
Affiliation
Name
George
Supervisor
Casadio
Past Member
On
Moved to Institute
Dept. of Physics, Univ. of Crete & IA/FORTH - MSc student
Student Category
Director
Off
Starting Year
2021
Ending Year
2023
Departure Date
Female
Off

Psarakis

Psarakis
Education

Harry Psarakis graduated from the 2nd High School of Heraklion and obtained his BSc in Physics from the Univ. of Crete in 2021. He is currently an MSc student at the Advanced Physics Program of the Department Physics of the University of Crete.

Career

During his undergraduate studies, he collaborated with the Dr. Pablo Reig studying the properties of high-mass X-ray Binaries using optical spectra from Skinakas Observatory. He also spent 4 months at the Max Planck Institute of Astronomy (Germany), where he started the development of Exo-Striker's web documentation, a sophisticated scientific software, and he was involved in the dynamical analysis of a two planet system (HD82943), composed of two massive planets locked in 2:1 mean motion resonance.

Interests

X-ray Binaries, Exoplanets.

Email
Office
232 Physics Bldg
Telephone
(+30) 2810 39-4239
Affiliation
Name
Charalampos
Supervisor
Zezas
Past Member
On
Student Category
Director
Off
Starting Year
2022
Ending Year
2023
Departure Date
Female
Off

Papadaki

katerina papadaki
Education

Katerina Papadaki completed her BSc in Physics and her MSc in Advanced Physics at the University of Crete in 2019 and 2021 respectively. In 2021 she commenced her PhD in the Department of Computer Science under the supervision of Dr. George Tzagkatakis and Prof. Kostas Tassis.

Career

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.

Interests

Astrophysics, Non-Linear Dynamics, Artificial Neural Networks, Machine Learning

Email
Office
230β Physics Bldg
Telephone
(+30) 2810 39-4265
Affiliation
Name
Katerina
Supervisor
Tzagkarakis, Tassis
Past Member
Off
Student Category
Director
Off
Starting Year
2021
Female
On