NATIONAL OBSERVATORY OF ATHENS
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Basilakos Spyros
DIRECTOR OF IAASARS & VICE-PRESIDENT OF NOA
DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH ACADEMY OF ATHENS
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Spyros Basilakos is a cosmologist with a career spanning scientific research, academic teaching and science communication. He has held a number of academic positions at various universities around Europe. Spyros Basilakos is the head of the Institute for Astronomy, Astrophysics, Space Applications and Remote Sensing (IAASARS) at the National Observatory of Athens. He is President of the Greek National Committee for Astronomy that advises the Greek government for issues which are related with Astronomy and Astrophysics. Also, he is the National Delegate in the International Astronomical Union (IAU). Since 09/02/2021 Dr. S. Basilakos serves the governing board of NOA from the post of Vice-President.

He completed his PhD studies in Cosmology at the University of Athens. During the period 1999-2002, he worked as a PPARC fellow at the Imperial College (UK). From 2002 to 2005, he worked within NOA’s (National observatory of Athens) program searching for the clustering properties of the large scale structures. In 2005 he joined the astrophysics group at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands) as a NOVA fellow. For the period 2006-2014 he was a faculty member (Senior Researcher) at the Academy of Athens (RCAAM) and a Visiting Professor at the University of Barcelona (2011-2012). Today he is Director of Research at the Academy of Athens, adjunct professor at the European University of Cyprus and head of IAASARS. In 2013, 2014, 2017 and 2019 he participated in the international Gravity competition organized by the Gravity Research Foundation (GRF-USA) and his scientific works received honorable mentions by GRF. Moreover, Dr. Basilakos  is Principal Investigator (PI) in two ESA funded projects related to laser link telecommunications [HOTSPOT under the Operations Development support for Optical and Quantum Infrastructure framework) and MFOC (under the Optical communications and photonics Makerspace framework)] as well as he participates in the HORIZON 2020 Hellas-QCI program related to Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) experiments. He supervised a large number of PhD and MSc theses and he participated in several international collaborations and scientific programs. His research work has led to ~250 scientific articles. He has given lectures in Cosmology and General Relativity at the University of Athens from 2013 to 2020. Currently, contributes to public engagement events in science.

 

RESEARCH
INTERESTS

Cosmological tests of General Relativity, modified gravity, nature of dark energy and the accelerating Universe, quantum cosmology, the physics of inflation and the evolution of matter perturbations, statistical and geometrical measures for quantifying large-scale structures.