Dimitri Nanopoulos
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Professor Dimitri Nanopoulos (born 13 September 1948 in Athens) is a Greek physicist. He is one of the most regularly cited researchers in the world, cited more than 19,000 times over across a number of separate branches of science.[1]
He studied Physics at the University of Athens and he graduated in 1971, continuing his studies at the University of Sussex in England, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1973 in High Energy Physics. He has been a Research Fellow at the Center of European Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland and for many years he has been a staff member, and has also been a Research Fellow in Ecole Normale Superieure, in Paris, France and in Harvard University, Cambridge, United States. In 1989, he was elected professor at the Department of Physics, at the NASA -supported Texas A&M University, where since 1992 he has been a Distinguished Professor of Physics, and since 2002 holder of the Mitchell/Heep Chair in High Energy Physics. He is also a distinguished HARC fellow at the Houston Advanced Research Center, in Houston, Texas, USA. In 1997 he was appointed regular member of the Academy of Athens. In 2005 he was appointed President of the Greek National Council for Research and Technology, National representative of Greece to the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, CERN and to the European Space Agency (ESA).
He has made several contributions to particle physics and cosmology, and works in string unified theories, fundamentals of quantum theory, astroparticle physics and quantum-inspired models of brain function. He has written over 540 original papers, all published in peer-reviewed journals with high impact , including 13 books. He has over 30,000 citations, placing him as the fourth most cited High Energy Physicist of all time, according to the 2001 and 2004 census. Since 1988 he has been fellow of the American Physical Society, and since 1992 member of the Italian Physical Society. In 1996, he was made Commander of the Order of Honour of the Greek State.
With his colleagues John Hagelin, a former U.S presidential candidate, and the British John Ellis he derived the flipped SU(5) model of the unification of forces from heterotic string.
On 17 October 2006 he was awarded the Onassis International prize by the Alexander S. Onassis Foundation.