Dr. Giannis Zacharakis is a Principal Researcher at the Institute of Electronic Structure and Laser – Foundation for Research and Technology (FORTH – IESL) and the Head of the Laboratory for Biophotonics and Molecular Imaging. He has served as the Vice President (2018 -2019) and President (2019-2020) of the European Society for Molecular Imaging (ESMI) and he has served two terms as a Member of the Council of the same Society (2014-2018). He is also the elected vice-president of the board of researchers at FORTH. He received his BSc in Physics in 1997 and his PhD in Biomedical Imaging in 2002 from the University of Crete. During 2003 and 2004 he has been a Research Fellow in Radiology at Harvard University, Cambridge MA USA. Between 2005 and 2009 he has been a Research Associate at FORTH-IESL and was promoted to Research Scientist between 2009 and 2016. In 2017 he was elected in his current position. 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 63 publications in international peer-reviewed journals, 48 articles in peer-reviewed conference proceedings, 2 book chapters, 1 editorial article and 2 patents, as well as over 1700 citations (h-index: 19, Google Scholar). 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