People
Nektarios Chrysoulakis
Director of Research - Head of RSLabDr. Nektarios Chrysoulakis is a Director of Research at the Foundation of Research and Technology Hellas (FORTH) and the Head of the Remote Sensing Lab of the Institute of Applied and Computational Mathematics. He holds a BSc in Physics, a MSc in Environmental Physics and PhD in Remote Sensing from the University of Athens. He has been involved in R&D projects funded by the European Union, the European Space Agency and the Ministries of Environment, Development, Culture and Education. His main research interests include climate change and urbanization, urban climate, urban energy balance, urban resilience, urban planning and metabolism, natural and technological hazards, surface temperature and albedo, environmental monitoring and change detection.
Dr. Chrysoulakis is the cPI of the European Research Council (ERC) Synergy project urbisphere, focusing on coupling dynamic cities and climate. He is the Coordinator of the Horizon Europe (Space) project CLMS-Cities, contributing to CLMS (Copernicus Land Monitoring Service) evolution, by developing innovative methods to monitor climate change mitigation activities in cities that have joined the EU Cities Mission. He also coordinates the development of Urban Analytics Services of the Greek National Satellite Space Programme, in the frame of the project SAT4GAIA (Axis 3 Land Monitoring Service). He served as Coordinator of the Horizon 2020 (Space) project CURE, focused on Copernicus Services exploitation in the domain of urban resilience; and as Coordinator of the Horizon 2020 (Space) project URBANFLUXES, provided novel scientific insights on the monitoring the Urban Energy Balance at local scale, generating new satellite opportunities. He has also coordinated the projects SEN4RUS (ERA.Net-RUS Plus), BRIDGE (FP7) GEOURBAN (FP7) and participated in projects CoCO2(H2020), HARMONIA (H2020), ECOPOTENTIAL (H2020), THINKNATURE (H2020), IGIC (LIFE) and FLIRE (LIFE).
Dr. Chrysoulakis is a Fulbright Visiting Fellow at Yale University (Yale School of the Environment) and the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Eratosthenes Centre of Excellence, in Earth Observation, space technology and geospatial analysis. He is also a Visiting Professor at the Department of Physics of the University of Crete (course: “Principles and Applications of Satellite Remote Sensing”); and at the CIHEAM-MAICh (course: “Remote sensing of Urban Environments”). Since 2016 he has served as co-Chair of the SPIE Conference on “Remote Sensing Technologies and Applications in Urban Environments” and member of the Editorial Board of the Section “Urban Remote Sensing” of the Scientific Journal “Remote Sensing". He has also served as Guest Editor of the special issue of the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing on “Exploring the Potential of Urban Remote Sensing”. He serves as Chair of the EuroGEO Urban Action Group and has been involved in GEO Climate Change Working Group, as well as in GEO Programme Board Urban Resilience Subgroup. He was the Symposium Chair of Joint Urban and Remote Sensing Event - JURSE 2023, as well as the Finance Chair of the 44th International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium - IGARSS 2024. He has given more than 45 Invited Talks at international conferences, advanced educational seminars and workshops. He has supervised ten postdoctoral researchers and co-supervised eight PhD candidates. He has more than 350 publications in peer-review journals and conference proceedings.