Biography and professional journey

Career overview

I have a diploma from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) (1974), and two M.Sc. degrees (1977) and a Ph.D. (1979) from MIT, USA. I have been Assistant and Associate Professor at MIT from 1979 to 1989, a Professor at NTUA from 1989 to 2013, and a Professor at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) from 2013 to 2023. I am now Professor Emeritus at DTU. I have been the PI or co-PI in some 55 funded projects (25 from the EU). I have coordinated 3 EU projects, including project SuperGreen on European green corridors (2010-2013). Latest EU project has been AEGIS (2020-2023). I have been a member and chairman of various groups at the IMO, and have also served as CEO of the Piraeus Port Authority (1996 -2002). I have published extensively and have received several academic and industry awards. My latest book is entitled “Sustainable Shipping: A Cross-Disciplinary View” (Springer, 2019).

Academic career

This has been an academic career of (at least) 44.5 years, or 534 months. In a strict sense, it started on 1 July 1979 when I started as an Assistant Professor at MIT, and it ended on 31 Dec. 2023 when I retired as a Professor at DTU. 

More precisely, below are all of the academic positions I have held thus far:

  • Assistant Professor, MIT (7/1979-6/1983)
  • Associate Professor, MIT (7/1983-6/1989)- with tenure from 7/1985
  • Professor, NTUA (6/1989-5/2013)
  • Professor, DTU (5/2013-12/2023)

I do not count my time as a Research Associate (Postdoc) at MIT (9/1978-6/1979), prior to starting as an Assistant Professor. Nor do I count 4 years as a Research and Teaching Assistant when I was a graduate student at MIT (9/1974-8/1978). Had I counted those too, it would be almost 50 years- in fact my 50 year jubilee graduation from NTUA (1974) was in 2024 (=1974+50).

This web site is an imperfect and incomplete attempt to give a personal account, with an emphasis on research.

First, a disclaimer: I can now confess that I really did not plan any of this when I finished my undergraduate studies at NTUA in 1974 and was ready to go to MIT.  Most surely I did not plan to have an academic career; I did not plan to switch interest from hard core naval architecture and marine engineering to operations research and transportation logistics; I surely did not plan to return to Greece in 1989; I did not plan to go the port of Piraeus in 1996 and surely I did not plan to go to DTU.

Over my academic career, I dealt with many different research areas that were very diverse and some had very little or zero commonality with other areas. For me personally this diversity has been pretty exciting. 

My port of Piraeus CEO career involved a completely different dimension, and it was sometimes schizophrenic to see the same topic from two perspectives, the academic perspective and the real world perspective, and realize there was a huge gap between the two. It was indeed a once in a lifetime experience, and the port of Piraeus was a great school. See relevant section for more.

My involvement in sustainable shipping started in 2008 with a very small project on ship emissions sponsored by the Hellenic Chamber of Shipping. And then there were many additional projects and as it turned out this has been the main focus of my research activity in recent years.  

My participation in the activities of the IMO (International Maritime Organization) started in 2006, as a member of the Greek delegation, and involved both IMO's Maritime Safety Committee (MSC) and the Marine Environment Protection Committee (MEPC). In 2007 I chaired a group on environmental risk evaluation criteria as applied to oil pollution, something that lasted 4 years. I was also in various MEPC groups on greenhouse gases (GHGs), which is a topic that I have followed in recent years. See HERE for an incomplete list of IMO documents (only those under the Greek delegation are included- there are also some under the Danish delegation). 
 
Among the 55 research projects of which I have been the Principal Investigator (PI) or co-PI (11 at MIT, 32 at NTUA, and 12 at DTU), 25 were EU projects. Among the latter, I was the consortium manager in 3, all at NTUA.  The full list of all these projects is HERE. An estimate of the total funding of these projects is close to 16 million € (2023 prices). 
 
A link to NTUA projects is HERE; the Lab for Maritime Transport (LMT) web site (www.martrans.org) gives a pretty accurate account of all of my NTUA activity and also hosts many of my papers including some from MIT. There is no similar link for MIT or for DTU projects. See relevant section HERE. 

 

With my nephew Dimitris Giannakis, Professor at Dartmouth University

Port of Piraeus career

In addition to my academic endeavors, I also served as CEO of the Piraeus Port Authority (OLP) for close to 5 ½ years, in the positions of ‘General Manager’ (August 1996- August 1999) and of ‘Managing Director’ (October 1999- March 2002). Both positions were CEO positions, the first during the era the port was a public-law undertaking (1930-1999), and the second after the port was transformed into a corporation (1999 on). Piraeus is the largest port in Greece, and one of the largest of the Mediterranean, with significant passenger and container traffic. Its annual turnover ranged from €105 to €130 million in the above period and its number of employees was about 2,000.

For more see HERE:

After retirement

After my retirement from DTU (1.1.2024), I did not completely close shop.

See pension-logues below.

Pension-logue 2024

Pension-logue 2025