Dr. Dimitris Nanopoulos was born in Athens on 13 September 1948 and studied physics at the University of Athens, where he graduated in 1971. Two years later he obtained his doctorate in Theoretical High Energy Physics from the University of Sussex in England. He has been a senior member of the research staff at the Center of European Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. He has also been a Curie Fellow at Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, and a Research Fellow at Harvard University, Cambridge, USA. In 1989 he was appointed Professor at the Physics Department of the Texas A & M University, College Station, where, since 1992, he has been a Distinguished Professor of Physics; since 2002 he holds the Mitchell-Heep Chair in High Energy Physics endowed with the amount of $1, 5 Million dollars. He is also Director of the Houston Advanced Research Center (HARC) Astroparticle Physics Group where he also directs a research department of the World Laboratory, based in Lausanne, Switzerland. In 1997 he was appointed regular member of the Academy of Athens. His main research activity focuses on High Energy Physics and Cosmology. The aim of his research is the creation of a unified theory of all forces in Nature, a Theory of Everything, which will provide a scientific explanation of the universe, how it appeared, how it evolved, and how it has reached its current morphology.
He is the author of over 625 original papers, all published in journals with critics and high impact factor, including 14 books. He has over 37,500 citations placing him as the fourth most cited Physicist of all time, according to the November 2001 and the September 2004 census (University of Stanford). Since 1988 he has been a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and since 1992 a member of the Italian Physical Society. In 1996 he was made Commander of the Order of Honour of the Greek Republic, and in May 2005, a year dedicated to honoring the 100 years of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, he won for the second time (first time in 1999) the award of the Gravity Research Institute, based in Massachusetts, USA. He was awarded the Onassis International Prize in October 2006, while in 2009 he was awarded the “Enrico Fermi” International Prize by the Italian Physical Society.
From January 2005 until December 2010 he was National Representative to the Center for European Nuclear Research (CERN); from 2005 to 2009 he served as President of the Greek National Council for Research and Technology (ESET), and from 2005 to 2006 he was National Representative to the European Space Agency (ESA).