Prof. Costas Pitris (male), First Time FET Participant, is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Cyprus, which he had joined since its inception in 2002. Dr. Pitris has completed his studies at the University of Texas at Austin (BS Honors in Electrical Engineering, 1993, MS in Electrical Engineering, 1995), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D. in Electrical and Medical Engineering, 2000), and Harvard Medical School (MD Magna Cum Laude in Medicine, 2002). He has worked as a re-search assistant at the University of Texas and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and as a postdoctoral associate at the Wellman Laboratories of Photomedicine of the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
The main research interests of Prof. Pitris include the area of novel medical, point-of-care, diagnostics based on imaging, spectroscopy, image and signal processing, and computational intelligence. The overlying goal of this research is the introduction of new technologies in clinical applications for the improvement of the diagnostic and therapeutic options of modern health care systems to directly impact patient prognosis and outcome. The value of this research has been recognized by the European Research Council (Starting Grants 2007, second round short list, top 5% out of more than 9000) and the Cyprus Entrepreneurship Competition (three awards.) Prof. Pitris has published 44 peer reviewed journal publications, 129 conference proceedings, 4 book chapter, 1 book, and 8 US and other patents. The citations to this work have reached more than 9900, according to Google Scholar, with an h-index of 36.
Prof. Pitris has an extensive experience in managing large-scale research projects. He has served as the principal investigator (~ € 1 mil.) as well as the co-principal investigator (~ € 1.5 mil.) of several competitive research grants. These include several projects from the Research Promotion Foundation (RPF) of Cyprus (ECHOMELANO, URORAMAN, NANOGRAM, NEURORHAPHE, PHOTAVGIA, SUPERRESOLUTION). Prof. Pitris is also one of the co-founders and a member of the core executive committee of the “KIOS Research Center for Intelligent Systems and Networks.” The Center was established in 2009 through an RPF infrastructure grant and has recently been awarded a prestigious EU H2020 TEAMING award (WIDESPREAD-01-2016-2017), for a total budget of € 40 mil., to evolve into a European Center of Excellence.
Prof. Pitris is a grant reviewer for the European Commission (FP7 and H2020, Health, Nanomedicine, Eureka, Cost), National Institutes of Health, USA (Biomedical Optics), and the Cyprus Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Tourism (Start-up Incubators.) He is also the cofounder of two start-up companies in the area of medical diagnostics which themselves have been the recipients of more than € 2 mil. in competitive national and European research funding. Additional teaching activities included an adjunct lecturer appointment at the Cyprus International Institute for the Environment and Public Health, in association with the Harvard School of Public Health. He is also an active member of IEEE, OSA, SPIE and has served on number of conference committees. Prof. Pitris is also a reviewer for Optics Letters, Applied Optics, Journal of Biomedical Optics and Nature Publications.
Prof. Stavros Iezekiel (male), First Time FET Participant, is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Cyprus where he also leads the research activity in microwave photonics. His main research focus at present is on mm-wave radio-over-fibre (with potential applications to 5G), integrated microwave photonics and modelling of transistor lasers. He has published over 130 papers and edited a book in microwave photonics, in addition to having given a large number of invited talks at leading conferences. Dr Iezekiel received the 1999 IEE/NPL Measurements Prize for his work in microwave photonic measurements. He currently serves as the Editor-in-Chief of IET Microwaves, Antennas and Propagation.From 1993 to 2006, he was on the academic staff at the University of Leeds, where as senior lecturer he served as Deputy Director of the Institute of Microwaves and Photonics (one of the world’s leading centres for research in high-frequency devices, circuits and systems) and also as the Director of Learning and Teaching in the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering. He successfully supervised 17 Ph.D. students while at Leeds, many of whom won prizes for their work and are now in senior positions in UK and US industry or have formed their own start-ups. He has received approximately €5.0M on a variety of grants, most of which have either been wholly or partially funded by industry. In 2011 he was an Invited Professor at the ESYCOM Lab of ESIEE Paris.In addition to his extensive research experience in photonics and microwaves, Dr. Iezekiel has a very broad teaching portfolio across all degree levels and several years of administrative and academic management experience. He has led innovations in teaching, including development of a M.Eng. in Photonics at Leeds that was fully funded by Agilent Technologies and succeeded in attracting top quality students. His academic leadership experience includes being President (Head) of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Cyprus (UCY) between 2010 and 2014, overseeing the continued success of one of the newest and most research active departments at UCY, with a combined research income of €10M in its first eight years of operation. He is also very active within professional societies, mostly the IEEE, where he has served on a number of different committees, guest-edited special issues and organized a number of high-profile events in microwaves and photonics, including the 2015 International Topical Meeting on Microwave Photonics, the leading event in the field.
Prof. Marco A. Antoniades (male), First Time FET Participant, received the B.A.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Waterloo, ON, Canada, in 2001, and the M.A.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Toronto, ON, Canada, in 2003 and 2009, respectively.
He is the Director of the Microwaves and Antennas Laboratory, a Founding Member of the EMPHASIS Research Centre, and a Lecturer in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Cyprus. He is also an Adjunct Fellow in the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at The University of Queensland, Australia. He has authored over 70 refereed publications, and has coauthored three book chapters titled Transmission-Line Based Metamaterials in Antenna Engineering that appears in the Handbook of Antenna Technology (Springer, 2016), Antenna Applications of Negative Refractive Index Transmission-Line (NRI-TL) Metamaterials that appears in the Modern Antenna Handbook (Wiley, 2008) and Compact Planar Multiband Antennas for Mobile Applications that appears in Advancements in Microstrip and Printed Antennas (InTech, 2013). His research interests include passive and active antenna design, RF/microwave circuits and negative-refractive-index metamaterials for use in broadband wireless communications, biomedical devices and imaging, space/satellite applications, radio-frequency identification, and wireless power transfer.
Dr. Antoniades is a Senior Member of the IEEE, a member of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society (AP-S), the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTT-S), and the European Association on Antennas and Propagation (EurAAP). He received the Hellenic Canadian Federation of Ontario Academic Excellence Award in 2003, and the Edward S. Rogers Sr. Graduate Scholarship from the University of Toronto during 2003–2004 and 2004–2005. He also received the First Prize in the Student Paper Competition at the 2006 IEEE AP-S International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation. During 2009–2011, he was the recipient of the Ontario Post-Doctoral Fellowship from the Ministry of Research and Innovation of Ontario. He has served as the joint conference chair of the 2015 Loughborough Antennas and Propagation Conference (LAPC), on the steering committee for the 2010 IEEE AP-S International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation, and serves regularly on the technical program committee for the IEEE AP-S International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation (APS/URSI), the European Conference on Antennas and Propagation (EuCAP), and the IEEE Radio and Wireless Symposium (RWS). He is currently a member of the IEEE AP-S Education Committee and is an Associate Editor of IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters (AWPL), and IET Microwaves, Antennas and Propagation (MAP).
Dr Konstantinos Faropoulos MD, PhD, Special Scientist at the University of Cyprus Medical School (male), First Time FET Participant, is a neurosurgeon with particular interest in intracranial oncology. Moreover, he has laboratory experience in protein level measurement using western blot technic, while his PhD thesis was the evaluation of oxidative stress in distal organs after bile duct ligation and the association of brain oxidative stress with the disruption of blood-brain barrier. His running research project concerns the correlations of intracranial tumor induced cerebral oedema with the expression of aquaporins. Some of his resent publications about intracranial lesions concern intravertricular cavernomas, while he was co-author of the poster “Correlation of p-P44/42 MAPK, p-P38 MAPK and PHOSPHO-SAPK/JNK expression and survival in patients with cerebral glioblastoma” which was presented in the 25th Hellenic Congress of Neurosurgery.
Dr. Andreas Perentos (male), First Time FET Participant, received the BEng (First Class Hons) and Ph.D. degrees in communication engineering and optical communication devices technology from RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia in 2001 and 2006 respectively. His Ph.D. work involved the realization and analysis of integrated optic, Long-Period Waveguide Gratings for WDM monitoring. He then took a 5-year break from academic research to work in the mobile telecom operator industry, returning to academic research in late 2010 to join Prof. Stavros Iezekiel at UCY to assist him in the setup of the microwave photonics research laboratory. Andreas worked on the setup of an integrated 60 GHz radio-over-fibre system with a CWDM PON. He has also worked on the EDA funded project NANOCAP where he investigated the application of silicon photonic ring resonators for microwave photonic and radio-over-fiber filtering. In April 2014, he went to Birmingham to work as a Research Fellow at the Aston Institute of Photonic Technologies in the area of high capacity optical communications. Whilst at Aston, Andreas primarily worked on the FP7-ICT project FOX-C and partially on the EPSRC project UNLOC, gaining significant experience and producing high impact research results in the fields of 3R optical regenerators and all-optical OFDM & F-OFDM. After one year at Aston, he returned at UCY to work on the Cyprus/Israel project RADEX with Finisar Israel as the main partner for producing and testing 30 GHz radio-over-fiber transceivers for long-reach applications. He serves as a regular reviewer for IEEE, OSA and Elsevier journals (PTL, JLT, OE, OL, AO and OFT).
Ms. Louiza Sophocleous (female), First Time FET Participant, received her undergraduate degree in Applied Mathematics and Physical Sciences from National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) in 2009. She then joined the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College London, UK where she earned an MSc in Biomedical Engineering (2010). She completed a traineeship at the European Medicines Agency in 2011 and in 2012 she joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Cyprus as a graduate level researcher (Ph.D student). She is currently a researcher at KIOS Research and Innovation Center of Excellence under the supervision of Dr. Costantinos Pitris. Her research Interests include but are not limited to Biomedical Signal Analysis, Medical Diagnostics and Medical Imaging.
Ms. Kosmia Loizidou (female), First Time FET Participant, received a BSc in Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering as well as a minor degree in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Cyprus, in 2016. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Cyprus, holding the position of a Special Scientist at the “KIOS Research and Innovation Centre of Excellence.” Her research interests are Biomedical Engineering and clinical health with a specific focus in image processing, pattern recognition and machine learning, for diagnosis and prognosis.
Ms. Kalina Georgiades (female), is a European Funds specialist and project manager with over 20 years’ experience of working in the public sectors in the UK and Cyprus. She has a unique blend of expertise in research and innovation projects as well as an excellent track record in securing and managing regional development projects. She has worked at both strategic policy and operational levels in EU funding, including the development of projects and the preparation of proposals for several European funding programmes. She is currently the Project Manager of KIOS RU, managing all EU funded projects being delivered at the Centre. She has also worked with a number of government departments in Cyprus with proposal development and project management. A key aspect of her role is to offer project management support to the Faculty and researchers at KIOS RU to develop proposals and manage projects. This includes the identification of suit-able funding opportunities and the management of collaboration with potential partners. She also works on several aspects of the overall management and coordination of the Centre’s development priorities, including partner liaison, communication, and publicity.
She is an external evaluator for the EC and an ad-hoc advisor to the Cypriot Directorate General of European Programmes Coordination and Development. She has steered and directed strategic approaches in relation to government and European funding priorities, initiated and forged sustainable multi agency partner-ships, and coordinated approaches to influence policy formation in regeneration and socio-economic development at regional and local levels.