Description of FORTH

FORTH is the leading research center in Greece housing the following institutes: Institute of Electronic Structure and Laser, Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, Institute of Applied & Computational Mathematics, Institute of Computer Science, Institute of Mediterranean Studies, Institute of Chemical Engineering & High temperature chemical process, Biomedical Research Institute, and Crete University Press. FORTH has an extensive experience in managing externally funded projects. It runs currently more than 51 national projects and 180 European projects with a budget of 10.7 and 51.5m€ respectively. FORTH is currently the coordinator more than 30 projects out of these 180 European projects. In addition to the current projects, FORTH has run more than 830 national and European projects of a total budget of around 110 m€ since 1986. Finance and accounting systems of FORTH work with SAP 4.0B implemented since 1/1/2002.

Amongst the more than 30 projects that FORTH coordinates, the IMBB coordinates an interdisciplinary STREP project involving the IESL that makes use of Molecular Imaging optical techniques to study transcription dynamics that control specific gene-expression programs.  Another project coordinated by the IESL that involves IMBB is an Integrated Project directly and uniquely dedicated to developing and improving techniques for Molecular Imaging.

The successful involvement of the members of this mono-site in training of researchers in the past and present is a guarantee of success. Also, due to the major involvement of the four institutes in international research projects, and being coordinators of more than 30 of them, it is clear that the mono-site proposed has the sufficient expertise, know-how and structural organization to ensure the correct training and functioning of the Early Stage Training site. As mentioned before, the main strength of the proposed site is the fact that four major institutes dedicated to Biology, Physics, Mathematics and Computer Science, share the same campus and administration.

Infrastructures

The following Infrastructures present at the Institutes of FORTH will contribute to training in Molecular Imaging:

IMBB: Laser scanning Confocal Microscope, Nomarski Differential Interference Contrast microscopy, Animal House, Flow Cytometer, Animal Cell Culture, Insect Cell Culture, Protein Crystalography, Transgenic Animal Facility, Insectarium.  Low-power stereo microscopy to detect fluorescent probes (GFP, dsRed) in large specimens/ whole organisms.

IESL:  Versatile laser-scanning microscope capable of imaging linear and non-linear effects in fluorescence, fluorescence life-time, excitation and emission spectra; a 3D optical tomographer for in-vivo imaging of fluorescent compounds; a super-computer cluster with 12 Pentium 4 computers at 2.53 GHz with 2Gb of RAM each.

IACM: A supercomputer cluster with a high-resolution graphics platform. Software for a wide range of nonlinear inversion methods.

ICS: The Robotics laboratory is very well equipped in computers (Pentium IV), robotics platforms and image processing/analysis tools. The Center for Medical Informatics and Health Telematics Applications (CMI-HTA) offers a wide range of innovative computer methods and tools in the area of medical informatics, information systems, telematic applications in medicine, and added-value analysis for multimedia medical data (e.g. medical image retrieval).