Professor Vassilis Charmandaris was re-elected as Director of the Institute of Astrophysics of FORTH on 21.02.2023. The election was carried out by a seven-member Evaluation Committee appointed by the Ministry of Development and Investment and chaired by Prof. Kalliopi Petraki (École Normale Supérieure, France).

The appointment, for his second term, as Director of the Institute of Astrophysics of the Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas was published on 17.03.2023 (Government Gazette 242 YODD/17.03.2023).

Brief curriculum vitae

Vassilis Charmandaris received his B.Sc. degree in Physics from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 1989. He completed his postgraduate studies in the USA and received a PhD in Astrophysics from Iowa State University in 1995. He then worked as a postdoctoral researcher at CEA/Saclay and was a Marie Curie fellow at the Paris Observatory (France). In 1999, he returned to the Astronomy Department of Cornell University (USA), where he worked for 6 years with the team that built the infrared spectrograph of the Spitzer Space Telescope, which was launched by NASA in August 2003. Since 2005 he has been a faculty of the Department of Physics at the University of Crete, where he has been Professor of Observational Astrophysics as of 2014. During the period 2013-2018 he was the Director of the Institute of Astronomy Astrophysics Space Applications and Remote Sensing at the National Observatory of Athens. He was elected as the first Director of the Institute of Astrophysics at FORTH in January 2019.

Prof. Charmandaris also serves as President of the Hellenic Astronomical Society, Chairman of the Board of Directors of the European network "Opticon-RadioNET-Pilot", Vice-Chairman of the Board of Directors of the journal "Astronomy & Astrophysics", and is a member of various scientific boards and committees. More information about his research, as well as administration duties and teaching work, is available on his personal website: http://www.physics.uoc.gr/~vassilis