Aliki Nianaki, a Ph.D. candidate in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, combines a strong academic background in entrepreneurship and innovation with professional experience in technology transfer and academic entrepreneurship. Her doctoral research examines the success and failure factors of academic spin-offs within the Greek entrepreneurial ecosystem, with a particular focus on how university-based innovation ecosystems shape entrepreneurial outcomes. She currently serves as a Technology Transfer Officer at the Archimedes Center of NKUA, where she supports academic spin-off creation, research commercialization activities, and university–industry collaboration.

As a Fulbright Visiting Research Student, Aliki seeks to conduct an international comparative research project investigating how academic spin-offs mobilize and orchestrate resources across entrepreneurial ecosystems of different maturity levels. Building on an extensive longitudinal qualitative study of Greek academic spin-offs and ongoing comparative research between Greece and France, her proposed research in the United States aims to explore the dynamics of the world’s most advanced innovation ecosystem. Through in-depth interviews with key actors in the U.S. entrepreneurial ecosystem, she will examine the institutional, organizational, and cultural mechanisms that support academic entrepreneurship and technology commercialization. The resulting comparative analysis will contribute to the development of a multilevel framework explaining academic spin-off success and failure across emerging and advanced entrepreneurial ecosystems. The Fulbright experience will provide a unique opportunity to collaborate with internationally recognized experts, access diverse entrepreneurial communities, and situate her findings within a global context. Beyond advancing her doctoral dissertation, she aims to contribute to evidence-based policy discussions that strengthen academic entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystems in Greece, Europe and the U.S.

Anastasia Tsiropina is a Ph.D. candidate of Linguistics at the Department of English Language and Literature at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. Holding a Bachelor’s degree in English Language and Literature at the NKUA and an M.A. in European Linguistics from the University of Groningen, she has also served as a doctoral researcher at the Athens Digital Glossa Chronos (ATHDGC) project (funded by H.F.R.I) and the Glossa Contact Lab. Her doctoral research investigates the diachronic evolution of psych-verbs in Ancient Greek theatrical texts and their retranslations, both computationally and qualitatively, to better understand how grammatical voice, argument structure, and semantic roles change over time.

As a Fulbright Visiting Research Student, Anastasia will engage in a research initiative that bridges comparative linguistics with empirical corpus methodologies. Under the supervision of Professor Dr. Brian D. Joseph at The Ohio State University (OSU) in Columbus, her project seeks to explore patterns of syntactic and semantic change in experiential predicates, tracking parameters like emotional polarity and argument structure diachronic changes. Towards this end, she plans to set the foundation for building a systematically structured digital platform that will serve as a searchable, open-access repository and document the diachronic morphosyntactic structures of Ancient Greek psych-verbs alongside their Modern Greek and English equivalents. The Fulbright Visiting Research Student program provides a unique opportunity for Anastasia to access world-class resources, collaborate with internationally renowned experts in linguistics, and immerse herself in interdisciplinary research at the intersection of technology and the humanities.

Anna Siosiou is a Ph.D. candidate at the School of Agriculture, Forestry and Natural Environment at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTh), specializing in Crop Agro-Ecophysiology. Her doctoral research investigates the competitive and synergistic eco-physiological dynamics within intercropping systems involving oats (Avena spp.) and vetch (Vicia sativa L.). She holds an Integrated Master (IM.Sc.) in Crop Production and Field Crops Ecology, alongside an M.Sc. in Sustainable Agricultural Production Systems and Climate Change from AUTh. To further bridge agricultural research with high-throughput computational tools, she is currently pursuing a concurrent M.Sc. in Applied Bioinformatics.

As a visiting researcher at the University of Missouri under the mentorship of Dr. Erin Sparks , Siosiou aims to advance her doctoral work by integrating advanced methods in root biomechanics, high-resolution phenotyping, and physiological trait analysis with her field-based intercropping research. The Division of Plant Science and Technology at the University of Missouri provides an optimal ecosystem for this collaboration, offering direct access to controlled-environment growth chambers, mechanical testing platforms for brace-root strength, and specialized computational resources for image-based trait quantification. By bridging field-based agro-ecological observations with these cutting-edge biomechanical and advanced trait analysis workflows, she seeks to discover novel strategies to optimize plant mechanical stability, crop productivity, and climate resilience in sustainable agricultural systems.

Christina Emmanouil is a Ph.D. candidate at the Medical School of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, and the Biomedical Sciences Research Center ‘Alexander Fleming’. She also holds a B.Sc. in Biology from the University of Patras and a M.Sc. in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Her doctoral research focuses on the human gut microbiome and specifically explores how the microbiome is affected by dietary changes, with the broader goal of contributing to the understanding of biological mechanisms linking microbiome composition to health and disease. As part of her research, this work will be incorporated into a multi-omics framework, providing systemic insights into diet-responsive connections between the microbiome and host biology. As a Fulbright Visiting Research Student, Christina will visit the laboratory of Assistant Professor Emily Davenport at Pennsylvania State University, which focuses on deciphering the relationship between humans and microbiome. There, she will investigate the interaction of the gut microbiome with host gene expression across the intestinal epithelium. Given the role of the microbiome in health and disease, this work can provide insight into physiological mechanisms that link the microbiome with host biology. Overall, through her work, Christina seeks to advance the scientific foundation for the future development of microbiome-based preventive or therapeutic strategies.

Emmanouela Christina Betsiou is an English language teacher and Ph.D. candidate. She holds a B.A. in English Language and Literature and an M.A. in Foreign Language Learning and Teaching - both from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. In her Ph.D. she computationally analyzes writing quality in higher education, seeking to find out relations of corpus-internal micro and macro indices of lexical sophistication to usage-based corpus-external language. She takes particular interest in machine learning applications and explores which linguistic indices and to what extent predict essay scores and college year of study. Her research interests lie in the area of applied and computational linguistics as well as in language assessment. She has disseminated part of her work in an international symposium, engaged with workshop coordination on text analysis tools and participated in interdisciplinary research projects (e.g. Clinical Application of Computational Linguistics in People with Aphasia: From Coding to Talking; CACLA).

As a Fulbright scholar, Emmanouela Christina will spend six months at the Department of Psychology and Human Development at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, working with Prof. Scott Crossley. The study involves the collection of multisensory subjective estimates by adult population for target items with varying frequency and semantic representation order. This project will lead to the creation of a normative resource for English that can be used by researchers in numerous fields of study, such as psychologists and speech pathologists. The second research objective is to compare human responses to artificial intelligence (AI) ones and examine whether AI can approximate human semantic representations.

Emmanouil Kokkinakis is a physicist and Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Physics of the University of Crete and the Institute of Electronic Structure and Laser of FORTH, working under the joint supervision of Professors Konstantinos G. Makris and Eleftherios N. Economou. He received his B.Sc. in Physics and his M.Sc. in Photonics and Nanoelectronics from the University of Crete in 2022 and 2024, respectively. To date, he has authored several articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals and has presented his work at international conferences. His research lies at the crossroads of complex photonics, condensed-matter physics, and nonlinear wave physics, focusing on how light behaves in structured photonic systems where optical gain and loss coexist with disorder or nonlinear effects. By exploring these systems, his work aims to uncover new physical mechanisms for controlling wave propagation, localization, and power flow in complex photonic environments.

As a Fulbright Visiting Research Student at the University of Southern California, he will join Professor Demetrios N. Christodoulides’ group to study how the complex dynamics of nonlinear multimode optical systems can be understood and ultimately controlled, within the emerging research field of optical thermodynamics. This direction is motivated by a central challenge in high-power photonics: as optical power increases, conventional single-mode platforms reach fundamental limitations, while multimode systems offer new possibilities but remain difficult to harness because of their highly complex dynamics. Building on his background in non-Hermitian photonics, his six-month project will investigate the thermalization properties of engineered amplifying photonic systems, with the aim of identifying principles that could support future architectures for robust high-power lasers. A second direction will focus on coherent beam combining, namely the merging of multiple laser outputs into a single bright beam. Instead of relying on fragile external phase-locking schemes, the project will explore whether nonlinear thermalization can be engineered to naturally drive optical power toward desired modes, exploiting chaos and complexity as a route to order. Through this research, he aims to connect fundamental science with practical strategies for controlling light in emerging photonic technologies.

Ioannis Moutsinas is an Agricultural Engineer and Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Agriculture, Crop Production and Rural Environment, at the University of Thessaly. He graduated from the School of Agricultural Sciences of the University of Thessaly in 2013 and received his M.Sc. in Biosystems Engineering from the Farm Technology Group at Wageningen University & Research in 2015. Since 2016, he has been working at the Networks & Telecommunications Laboratory (NITLab) at the University of Thessaly as an Agricultural Engineer - Researcher, and Project Manager. Prior to joining NITLab, he worked both in a floriculture greenhouse and in an agricultural consultancy office for livestock farms in Greece and the Netherlands. Since 2020, Ioannis has also been a certified Agricultural Advisor. His research interests focus on the design, integration, and application of Internet of Things (IoT) and Remote Sensing technologies in agriculture, aiming to enhance sustainability, environmental management, and productivity in the primary sector. Throughout his research career, he has actively contributed to interdisciplinary research and innovation activities, including consortium development, stakeholder engagement, project management, resource coordination, data analysis, and impact assessment. To date, he has participated in more than 20 funded Research & Development projects related to Precision Agriculture, Climate-Smart Agriculture, and environmental sustainability. His doctoral research focuses on the assessment of the phenological responses of major fruit crops to climate variability and climate change by employing advanced IoT and Remote Sensing technologies. Through his research, Ioannis aims to contribute to the development of data-driven and climate-resilient agricultural systems that support sustainable food production and informed decision-making in modern agriculture.

As a Fulbright Visiting Research Student he will be engaged in a 6-month research project aimed at developing and validating real-time edge AI models for nutrient estimation in citrus orchards using UAV-based hyperspectral imaging, integrating advanced AI techniques for canopy segmentation, nutrient prediction, edge device deployment, and prescription map generation to enhance precision agriculture.