Nektarios Tavernarakis, a researcher at the Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (FORTH), has recently been awarded for the second time the prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Investigator Grant for his research proposal titled “MacroAutophagy and Necrotic Neurodegeneration in Ageing”.

George Garinis, a Professor at the Department of Biology, University of Crete and an affiliated group leader at the Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH), has recently been awarded the prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant for his research proposal titled "Dissecting the Functional Role of Nucleotide Excision Repair in Mammals-DeFiNER."

Prof. Stelios Tzortzakis from the IESL-FORTH has been invited to officially open the Optics 2013 conference in St. Petersburg last October with a plenary lecture, followed by a short ceremony where he was awarded the Rozhdestvensky Medal of the Russian Optical Society for key contributions in strong laser and THz field Optics. The Medal was delivered by the Russian Academician E. B. Alexandrov.

A new distinction for FORTH, Greece's major Research Centre, came through the recent approval by the ERC (European Research Council) of one more proposal that was submitted by Dr. Xenofontas Dimitropoulos of FORTH's Institute of Computer Science (ICS). This ERC grant will fund Dimitropoulos' "NetVolution" project, to perform research on evolving the routing system of the Internet. ERC starting grants are considered highly honorary: they are given for cutting edge research and they are very competitive -- in 2013, out of 3,329 proposals that were submitted Europe-wide and across all disciplines, only 287 were accepted, i.e. just nine percent (9%); only two (2) of these 287 approved grants are given to researchers in Greek institutions, and "NetVolution" is one of the two. Dr. Dimitropoulos is repatriating to Greece, coming to FORTH and the University of Crete, where he has been elected Assistant Professor, leaving his position with ETH Zurich.

Kostas Tokatlidis, Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Technology at the University of Crete and an affiliated Researcher at the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, Foundation of Research and Technology Hellas (IMBB-FORTH) has been elected as a member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO).

The paper entitled "AmI-RIA: Real-Time Teacher Assistance Tool for an Ambient Intelligence Classroom", presented by Asterios Leonidis, PhD Candidate at the University of Crete and member of the Human Computer Interaction Laboratory of ICS-FORTH, received the Best Paper Award at the 5th International Conference on Mobile, Hybrid, and On-line Learning (eLmL 2013, Nice, France, 24 February – 1 March 2013).

Nektarios Tavernarakis, a Research Director at the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology (IMBB) of FORTH-Hellas, and a Professor-elect at the Medical School of the University of Crete was awarded today the Grant Academic Excellence Prize of the Empeirikeion Foundation

Researchers at the Institute of Computer Science (ICS) Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (FORTH) received the First Award in the "Gesture Recognition Challenge" contest with their work titled "Giving a hand to Kinect"

George A. Garinis, Associate Professor of Genetics at the department of Biology, University of Crete and an affiliated Researcher at the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology (IMBB) of FORTH- Hellas has been awarded today the prestigious EMBO Young Investigator award for his research achievements on delineating the functional role of Nucleotide Excision Repair factors in development and disease

John Pendry, David Smith and Costas Soukoulis (IESL-FORTH) won the 2013 McGroddy Prize for New Materials, awarded by the American Physical Society