Prof. Athanasios Nenes, Affiliated Scientist of FORTH/ICE-HT,Coordinating Member of the Center for the Study of Air Quality and Climate Change (C-STACC) and Professor at the School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland has been selected as a Highly Cited Researcher in the field of Geosciences by Web of Science (WoS).

Nektarios Tavernarakis, Chairman of the Board of Directors at the Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas (FORTH) and Professor at the Medical School of the University of Crete, was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). This significant distinction comes as recognition of the scientific quality and the highly competitive research conducted at FORTH and the University of Crete.

Prof. Athanasios Nenes, Affiliated Scientist of FORTH/ICE-HT, Coordinating Member of the Center for the Study of Air Quality and Climate Change (C-STACC) and Professor at the School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland was elected by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fellows Committee as a member of the 2020 class of AGU Fellows.

Nektarios Tavernarakis, Research Director at the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology (IMBB) of the Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas (FORTH), and Professor at the Medical School of the University of Crete, was elected Member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.

The 1st Prize in the category “Digital Literacy in Science Education” at the 11th Science on Stage Europe 2019 Festival was awarded, to members of the Biophotonics and Molecular Imaging Group of the Institute of Electronic Structure and Laser of FORTH. This year’s festival was entitled “Skills for the future” and was held in Cascais Portugal from 31 October – 3 November 2019.

Dr. Nektarios Chrysoulakis, Director of Research at the Institute of Applied and Computational Mathematics of the Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas (FORTH) earned a highly competitive ERC Synergy Grant 2019.

The “Photonics Applications for Agrofoods and Environment Lab” of the Institute of Electronic Structure and Laser of FORTH was honored with the “Best Oral Presentation” award at the international conference of "Instrumental Methods of Analysis-Modern Trends and Applications"

(IMA2019), held at Ioannina on 22-25 September 2019.

Associate Professor Xenofontas Dimitropoulos, Affiliated Researcher to ICS-FORTH, ERC Starting Grant holder, and his team, the INSPIRE research group, were awarded their second ERC Proof of Concept grant for the RAVEN project. The ERC Proof of Concept Grants aim to maximize the value of the excellent research already supported by ERC, by funding further work (i.e., activities which were not scheduled to be funded by the original ERC frontier research grant) in order to explore the innovation potential of ideas arising from these projects. Proof of Concept Grants are therefore on offer only to Principal Investigators whose proposals draw substantially on their ERC funded research.

George A. Garinis, Researcher at the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology of the Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (FORTH) and Professor of Genetics at the Department of Biology, University of Crete, is one of just 62 scientists from across Europe that recently secured funding from the innovation-supporting Proof of Concept Programme of the European Research Council (ERC).

“ORamaVR”, a start-up of FORTH, was awarded the First Prize in the category “Technology with the Best Societal Impact”, in the Augmented World Expo 2019 (AWE 2019), one of the world’s largest exhibitions in virtual and augmented reality, held in Santa Clara, California on 28-31 May 2019(https://www.awexr.com/usa-2019). ORamaVR was awarded for their innovative software developed for the experiential training of surgeons in virtual reality. It is worth noting that it was the first time that a Greek start-up company participated in this exhibition.