Maria Petropoulou completed her undergraduate studies in
Physics at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA) in 2008.
She obtained an MSc degree in Astrophysics, Astronomy, and Mechanics in 2010 and
a PhD degree in Physics in 2014, both from the Department of Physics of NKUA.
She received the prize for the Best PhD Thesis from the Hellenic Astronomical
Society in 2015 and the Foundation MERAC in 2016. In 2013, she was selected by
NASA as one of the 12 Einstein Postdoctoral Research Fellows of that year. She
worked as an Einstein Fellow (2013–2016) and a Postdoctoral Research Associate
(2016–2017) at the Department of Physics and Astronomy of Purdue University,
West Lafayette, Indiana, USA. She then moved to the Department of Astrophysical
Sciences at Princeton University, New Jersey, USA, where she worked as a Lyman
Jr. Spitzer Postdoctoral Fellow (2017–2020). She joined the Department of
Physics of NKUA in 2020 as Assistant Professor. Her research interests lie in the
field of high-energy and multi-messenger astrophysics and include radiative
processes in astrophysical plasmas, particle acceleration processes, and cosmic ray
and neutrino production processes. She has given more than 30 invited talks at
international conferences and workshops. She is a member of the Hellenic
Astronomical Society (HelAS), the European Astronomical Society (EAS), the
American Astronomical Society (AAS), and the High-Energy Astrophysics Division
(HEAD) of AAS.
Georgios Vasilopoulos is a researcher working in the field of
observational high-energy astrophysics and the study of accreting objects. His
research focuses particularly on X-ray pulsars and ultra-luminous X-ray
systems. He obtained his Ph.D. from TUM while working at MPE. Following his
doctoral studies, he moved to New Haven while working at Yale University as a
postdoctoral associate for almost three years. He then moved to Strasbourg, working
as a postdoc and a member of the XMM-Newton SSC team and the «Galaxies, High
Energy, Cosmology, Compact Objects & Stars» group. In February 2023, he
moved back to Greece, as he had been awarded funding through the Hellenic
Foundation for Research and Innovation (H.F.R.I) to conduct research (see
Project ASTRAPE) at the University of Athens and the Institute of Accelerating Systems
and Applications (IASA).
