Dr. Giannis Zacharakis is a Principal Researcher (Associate Professor level) at IESL – FORTH, where he leads the Laboratory for Biophotonics and Molecular Imaging. He is the Vice President (President elect) of the European Society for Molecular Imaging (ESMI) and he has served two terms as a Member of the Council of the same Society. He received his BSc in Physics in 1997 and his PhD in 2002 from the University of Crete. During 2003 and 2004 he has been a Research Fellow in Radiology at Harvard University, Boston. Between 2005 and 2009 he has been a Research Associate at FORTH-IESL and was promoted to Research Scientist between 2009 and 2016. His main fields of interest are Biophotonics, Biomedical and Optical Imaging focusing on developing novel tools and key enabling technologies for imaging biological processes in living systems, ranging from cells to organs to whole organisms. He is active on both applied and fundamental research on novel photonic devises, concepts and new theory development and has developed technologies for three dimensional, tomographic imaging in model organisms and novel optical and optoacoustic microscopic techniques to extend imaging capabilities to unprecedented depths in opaque media. He has 52 publications in international peer-reviewed journals, 46 articles in peer-reviewed conference proceedings, 2 book chapters and 2 patents, as well as over 1300 citations (h-index 17). He has more than 50 presentations in international conferences, where he has been awarded 3 first prizes and has been invited more than 20 times in international conferences, schools and meetings.

Education

• 2002, PhD, Biomedical Imaging, University of Crete
• 1997, BSc Physics, University of Crete