Dimitri Nanopoulos

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Professor Dimitri Nanopoulos is a theoretical physicist best known for his work on Grand Unified Theory (GUT), a term which he is credited with coining in a paper published in 1978. He is one of the most regularly cited researchers in the world, cited more than 30,000 times over across a number of separate branches of science. ^{[citation needed]}

Born in Greece in 1948, he graduated from the University of Athens in 1971 and obtained his PhD from University of Sussex in 1973. He currently holds the title of Distinguished Professor at the NASA-supported Texas A&M University and heads the Astrophysics Division of the Houston Advanced Research Center (HARC), as well as being national representative for the international particle physics laboratory CERN and the European Space Agency ESA.

With his disciples John Hagelin, a former U.S presidential candidate, and the British John Ellis he invented the flipped SU(5) model of the unification of forces.

Flipped SU(5) is the only successful unification of superstring theory with the Standard Model of particle physics. He is the first to successfully merge quantum mechanics with gravity through his theory of "spacetime foam". He has also unified superstring theory with the science of the human mind, with his Quantum Liouville theory of brain microtubules.

On the 17th of October he was awarded with the Onassis International prize by the Hellenic Institute of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine studies in Venice.[1]