Katherine M. Pappas is Associate Professor of Genetics – Molecular Microbial Genetics in the Department of Genetics & Biotechnology, Faculty of Biology, University of Athens (NKUA) and the Head of the Department. She teaches and coordinates multiple courses at the undergraduate and postgraduate level. She has served in the NKUA Senate and is a founding member of the NKUA Center of Excellence in Basic Sciences and the NKUA Research Institute ‘Biotechnology, Bioeconomy & Biosustainability (Bio3)’. Katherine also serves in the NKUA Committee for Gender Equality in Sciences, as well as in multiple committees and Boards of the Faculty of Biology. She is currently the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) Country Ambassador to Greece and an ASM International Future Leaders Mentor. She has been Board Member and Secretary in the Hellenic Scientific Society ‘MikroBioKosmos’ and a consultant for the National Food Authority (EFET/ESET) and the Institute of Educational Policy. Her research laboratory in NKUA has been competitively funded since 2006 by multiple EU-awarded and national research programs. She has been organizer and Chair in dozens of conferences, member of many scientific societies, journal editor, journal article reviewer, as well as research grant, institutional and educational evaluator for Greek national authorities and the EU. She has authored original research papers and reviews in top ranked journals (Nature, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Reviews) and has received three National Scholarships Foundation (IKY) Awards of Excellence. Katherine will be visiting the Department of Microbiology, University of Wisconsin – Madison, and the affiliated US DOE Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC), to work with Dr Robert Landick, Laurens Anderson Distinguished Professor and GLBRC Director, on joint research programs addressing the genome, transcriptome and metabolic broadening of a bioethanol producing organism. Additionally, she will be visiting the Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, College of Natural Science, Michigan State University, and the affiliated DOE Plant Research Laboratory, to work with Dr Cheryl Kerfeld, Hannah Distinguished Professor of Structural Bioengineering, on biochemical pathway enclosure in bacterial microcompartments. Both these areas of research will open important networking opportunities between the host and the Fulbright grantee Institutions.

Alexandra Gkemitzi is a Professor at the Department of Environmental Engineering, Democritus University of Thrace (Greece). She holds a Bachelor Degree in Geology from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece) a Master of Science in Groundwater Engineering from University of Newcastle upon Tyne (UK). She obtained a Ph.D from the Department of Civil Engineering of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, sponsored by the National Scholarship Foundation. Before starting her academic career, she has worked as geologist for almost ten years in the private and public sector. Her main teaching and research interests are related to the simulation and assessment of environmental systems, climate and land use change effects and the prediction and risk assessment of extreme natural phenomena or natural disasters. During her academic career she promoted open science and devoted much effort in the realization of an open weather data hub for the Rhodpe area in Greece, a remote area, where almost no environmental monitoring existed. During 2015 she has been a visiting scholar at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of the University of New South Wales, Australia. She has been an adjunct professor at the Hellenic Open University and the National Center for Public Administration and Local Government. Her published work features several books and book chapters, over 40 publications in peer reviewed journals and over 60 conference presentations. Currently she is Project Coordinator of the CHISTERA project titled: NEW SOLUTIONS FOR DATA ASSIMILATION AND COMMUNICATION TO IMPROVE HYDROLOGICAL MODELLING AND FORECASTING. Acronym: WATERLINE. https://www.chistera.eu/projects/waterline As a 2023-2024 Fulbright Scholar, Alexandra will be hosted at the University of Virginia, U.S., to conduct research on the assimilation of remotely sensed soil moisture in hydrological models aiming to improve their predictive ability related to extreme natural events, like droughts and floods.

Dr. Apostolos Delis, is Principal Researcher in the IMS/FORTH. His research interests lie in the maritime economic and social history, the history of technology of the sailing ship and of the steamship, the shipbuilding industry, port history and the institutions of shipping business. Apostolos Delis has a long experience in several national and international research projects. He was the first Researcher of IMS-FORTH to receive the very prestigious ERC Starting Grant in 2016 with funding of 1.5 million Euros from the European Research Council. The project that run during the period 2017-2021 was called “SeaLiT”, titled Seafaring Lives in Transition, Mediterranean Maritime Labour and Shipping, 1850s-1920s. This project has produced multiple results like the Digital Seafaring, (https://sealitproject.eu/digital-seafaring), books, ph.D. theses, articles, seminars, workshops and conferences. As a Fulbright Scholar, he will be hosted at Yale University, in the Hellenic Studies Program of the Macmillan Center, New Haven, Connecticut. He will conduct research on the ship logbbooks of East Coast ships in West Indies in the late 18th and the 19th centuries, in the Beinecke Library, Yale University, the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, the Mystic Seaport Museum, Connecticut and the New York Public Library. the results of the research in the East Coast archives and libraries will contribute greatly to questions such as patterns in trade routes, voyage durations and the general progress of navigation, in relation to given ship technologies of American ships in the West Indies. These results, will further expand the information of the application Ship Voyages (http://www.sealitproject.eu/ship-voyages), created in the framework of the ERC STG 2016 project SeaLiT which I directed. This novel application acts as an indispensable tool for the development of the metadata found in the sources and for their further historical analysis, through the digital mapping of the routes. Until now, the application includes voyages of Mediterranean ships in the nineteenth century based on information from logbooks. The aim, therefore, is to expand and enrich it with information from voyages based on logbooks of American merchant sailing ships in the Caribbean. This information will be cross-referenced with information from sailing directions books and voyage accounts to offer a comprehensive understanding of the navigation in the West Indies. Very importantly, the material of the East Coast ships and shipping will greatly update a fundamental instrument, such as the Ship Voyages, for the study and analysis of navigation and for the understanding of how ships and seafarers connected and integrated the Mediterranean and the Caribbean seas to the world economy in the examined period.

Dr. Vagionas, having graduated from the Experimental School of Thessaloniki in 2002, received the Diploma of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2008 and subsequently the M.Sc. and PhD in 2011 and 2017 at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH) in Greece. He is currently a lecturer (adjunct) at the Department of Informatics at the University of Western Macedonia (UOWM) in Kastoria and a senior researcher at the WinPhoS research group at AUTH's Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Innovation. His main research interests lie in the field of integrated photonics for optical computing and communication systems, including Fiber Wireless technologies for emerging 5G/6G networks and integrated photonic memories for ultra-fast look-up search operations. His research has been funded as Principal Investigator by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation through a postdoctoral scholarship, a Marie Curie Fellowship-Industrial secondment at Phoenix Software (now Synopsys) in 2014 and 2016 in Enschede, the Netherlands, and has participated in ten EU-funded research projects. Dr. Vagionas has published more than 70 publications at prestigious international conferences and scientific journals, while he has been awarded an IEEE Photonics Society Graduate Student Fellowship at the IPC conference in Hawaii in 2016, a Newport travel grant by the Optical Society of America at the CLEO conference in San Jose, CA, in 2012 and a best student paper award at EUREKA national conference on Informatics in Kastoria in 2011. He has contributed to the organization of 10 scientific workshops, promoting inter-national and inter-cultural collaborations of young, fellow, European (so far) researchers. As 2023-2024 Fulbright Fellow, Dr. Vagionas will conduct research in innovative non-volatile phase change materials materials and opto-electronics at the University of Maryland, aiming to create a harmonic match between Materials Sciences and Physics with the Computing and Communications Sciences, and a solid ‘research bridge’ connecting the Northern Greece with the well-established and mature semiconductor fabrication processes in the USA .

Efthymia Papageorgiou is a postdoctoral researcher in Mathematical Analysis. Her research interests are focused on, but not limited to, harmonic and geometric analysis, on euclidean and non-euclidean settings. She received a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Mathematics from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, and in 2020 she completed her Ph.D. studies in Mathematics (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki). She is currently employed at the University of Paderborn, Germany. Prior to her current position, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Crete, Greece, and a visiting researcher at the University of Orleans, France, with a fellowship from the French Institute and the French Embassy in Greece. For her research activities, she has collaborated with colleagues from German, Italian, Belgian, and French institutes. Efthymia will visit the Department of Mathematics at Tufts University, Medford, hosted by Prof. K. Okoudjou, for the winter semester of 2023-2024, to conduct research on harmonic analysis, a very active field of research, whose interest lies in the interplay between its applied and pure aspects. The goal is to benefit from the active research environment in the USA and to establish new collaborative relationships in mathematics between researchers in Greece and the USA.

Filippa Chatzistavrou is a full time Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Policy at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens where she lectures among others on political science, comparative and European politics, interest groups theory and globalization. She has a PhD in Political Science (I.K.Y. Scholarship) from the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne. She holds a master's degree in Comparative Politics from the School of Law and Political Sciences of the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne and a degree in Law from the School of Law and Economic Sciences of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. In the past she has taught at the undergraduate and postgraduate level, among others, at the University of Paris VII Denis-Diderot, the IEP-Sciences Po Strasbourg. She was a postdoctoral researcher ("Fernand Braudel" Fellowship - Maison des Sciences de l'Homme (MSH), Fondation Robert Schuman research grant and NATO scientific research grant) at the research center for Comparative Analysis of Political Systems of the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne and researcher at the center European Political Sociology GSPE – CNRS (IEP-Sciences Po Strasbourg). She has participated and participates as a researcher or coordinator in European research programs and European Action programs (Horizon 2020 programs, Erasmus+, Jean Monnet Actions). Currently, she is the coordinator of the Jean Monnet Module "Citizen lobbying and policy change in Europe" 2023-2025. She has published numerous articles in collective volumes and peer-reviewed journals. Her most recent book analyses interest intermediation structures and normative frameworks in order to evaluate the role of lobbying in shaping public policy. As a Fulbright Scholar and visiting researcher at UC Berkeley University, Filippa Chatzistavrou will conduct research on Political Capitalism and repertoires of business action in the US. The objective of the project is to place the interaction of market dynamics and state capacities in the center of research interest, thus facilitating a better understanding of contemporary political capitalism through the study of the U.S. case. The intent of the research leave in the U.S. is to pursue research into the most contemporary aspects, political, regulatory, sociological and cultural, of the phenomenon in a country with a long scholar tradition in this field.

Fotini Vassiliou is Assistant Professor in Phenomenology at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and Adjunct Lecturer with the Graduate Program “Brain and Mind” at the School of Medicine, University of Crete. Her primary interests lie in 19th and 20th century Continental Philosophy, especially in the phenomenological and existential traditions. Her research concentrates on two main strands, namely Philosophy of Perception and Phenomenological Aesthetics, as they relate to the themes of embodiment, lifeworld primordiality, and conceptuality. The question that principally animates and unifies her work concerns the determinants of our primordial being-in-the-world in its perceptual, axiological, and praxial dimensions. She teaches courses in subjects related to Phenomenology, Philosophy of Mind, Epistemology, and Phenomenological Aesthetics. As a Fulbright Fellow she will spend three months at the Department of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. With her research project, she intends to critically evaluate the way Virtual Reality researchers discuss the different factors that contribute to the so called “Embodiment Illusion,” i.e., the illusion of owing and controlling a virtual body. Drawing on phenomenological philosophical analyses, she will investigate the understudied aspect of touch and, more particularly, the phenomenon of double-sensations, and their role for the constitution of both our own body and worldly things in their materiality. Her main objective is to shed new light on the essential role the body plays in the constitution of virtual experience itself, focusing on the phenomenon of virtual presence that so much preoccupies recent relevant literature.

Konstantinos Kormas leads the Microbial Communities and Habitats in Aquatic Environments Laboratory (MiCHAEL) of the University of Thessaly, Greece. The team’s research interests focus on the diversity and ecological role of prokaryotes and unicellular eukaryotes in the aquatic environment, with special emphasis on the associations and interactions of symbiotic microorganisms with aquatic animals. MiCHAEL work includes field, experimental and laboratory work in marine and freshwater systems, with specialty on molecular approaches including genomics and metagenomics. He is currently involved in two H2020 and 2 national research projects related to animal-microbe interactions. He is the author/co-author of 120 peer-reviewed papers, 9 book chapters and one book in Greek (“Ecology of aquatic microorganisms”). His published works have received >2800 citations (SCOPUS, excluding self-citations) and his h-index is 32.

Marlen is an Assistant Professor of Museology at the Faculty of History and Archaeology of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA) and member of a Cross-Faculty Committee for the Management of an Interdepartmental Postgraduate Programme in Museum Studies (NKUA). She is managing the Public Archaeology activities at the NKUA’s excavation project in Plasi, Marathon and she is also the Coordinator of the NKUA Open Labs under CIVIS Academic Consortium of European Universities, aiming to establish strategic partnerships between universities, non-academic organisations and civil society. Before joining the NKUA as a full-time member of academic staff, she worked for 16 years in state positions at the Hellenic Ministry of Culture (Directorate of Museums, Exhibitions and Educational Programmes). Throughout her career as a museologist both in research and practice, she has worked on numerous new museum exhibitions and organised several public heritage events. She has held leadership positions in the Network of European Academic Heritage (UNIVERSEUM), in the International Council of Museums (Chair of the Resolutions Committee of ICOM for the Triennial ICOM Conference 2019; Secretary and then Chair of the International Committee for the Collections and Activities of Museums of Cities-CAMOC, 2010-2016) and the European Museum Forum as Chair (2021-2022) and member (2016-2022) of the panel of judges for the European Museum of the Year Award. Together with Mark O’Neill and Jette Sandahl, she has co-edited the book Revisiting Museums of Influence (2021 by Routledge), which is an essential reading for museum professionals and students of museology on museum excellence and the capacity of museums to respond to changing societal needs. In 2015, under her capacity as Chair of CAMOC, she launched and co-cordinated the international project Migration: Cities /(im)migration and arrival cities funded by ICOM, which set out to explore the roles museums can have in collecting and presenting migration stories in collaboration with source communities. She is member of the Editorial Advisory Boards of several academic national and international journals. She believes in museum activism, in the role of culture for societal well-being and the key role museum professionals can play in social change. Thus she has developed the social initiative The Museum Inside Me, an online participatory community project which acted as a bridge of communication and expression between citizens in the difficult period of lockdown due to COVID-19. As a Fulbright Scholar, she will spend three months in the USA during the 2024 spring semester, hosted at New York University and the Museum Studies Program. There she will conduct research focusing on the impact of museum experiences on visitors’ wellbeing. More specifically, her research will seek to bridge museology with neuroscience in order to better understand the potential of museums as spiritual spaces. Her aim is to cross-analyze relevant bibliographical production in both fields of Museology and Neuroscience and establish in person communication with American professionals from Museology and Neuropsychology sectors in order to co-define new research lines on spirituality in museums.