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.

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.

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

The Acropolis Museum and the Institute of Electronic Structure and Lasers (IESL) of the Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas (FORTH) have been awarded the biennial Keck Award by the International Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (IIC) for their common project regarding “Laser rejuvenation of Caryatids opens to the public at the Acropolis Museum: A link between ancient and modern Greece”. The award was given jointly to the team of the Acropolis Museum / the Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas and for their contribution “towards the promotion of public understanding and appreciation of the accomplishments of the conservation profession”. The ceremony took place on Friday 14th of September 2012, at the closing session of the biennial IIC congress in Vienna, which attracted 350 delegates.

Panayiota Poirazi, a researcher in the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology (IMBB) at the Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas (FORTH), was recently awarded the prestigious Starting Grant of the European Research Council (ERC) for her proposal entitled "Dissecting the role of dendrites in memory".