ODU's Nikos Chrisochoides Selected for International Greek Diaspora Scholars Program

January 17, 2017

Nikos Chrisochoides

Nikos Chrisochoides, professor in Old Dominion University's Department of Computer Science, has been awarded a fellowship by the Greek Diaspora Fellowship Program to travel to Greece to collaborate on research and mentorship of computer imaging of the brain.

Chrisochoides is one of 21 Greek- and Cypriot-born scholars from 16 U.S. and Canadian universities who will travel to Greece to conduct academic projects with their peers at Greek universities. They will work in such areas as public health, chemical genomics research and urban food security.

He will work with Nicolas Foroglou, professor in the Department of Neurosurgery at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, and Efstratios Prasidis, professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of the Aegean, on collaborative research in image-guided brain surgery and mentoring graduate students in brain-image data analysis.

Chrisochoides created the MERIT freshman seminar program in the ODU Honors College to Mentor, Excite and Retain freshmen and help them Identify areas of study that Transform them into responsible college graduates.

His research covers a spectrum of activities within computational and data-enabled science and engineering, from basic research in engineering geometry to applied research in medical image computing.

Chrisochoides helped found Parallel Finite Element Mesh Generation, a branch of engineering geometry that develops methods of breaking down large complicated systems - such as knees and lungs - into pieces of a more suitable size for analysis.

Twelve Greek universities were selected by the Greek Diaspora Fellowship Program to host the fellows for collaborative projects that meet needs at their institutions and in their communities.

The Greek Diaspora Fellowship Program is designed to help avert Greece's brain drain and develop long-term, mutually beneficial collaborations between universities in Greece and the United States and Canada. It is managed by the Institute of International Education, in collaboration with the Fulbright Foundation in Greece, and funded by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.

Over two years, the program will award fellowships to 40 U.S. and Canadian based academics to collaborate with universities throughout Greece to develop curricula, conduct research and teach and mentor graduate students in priority areas identified by the Greek universities.

Among the projects supported by the first round of fellowships:

• Democritus University of Thrace will host a collaborative research project in software development for neurosurgical planning and graduate student training in neurosurgical procedures with a fellow from the University of Houston.
• A fellow from the University of Notre Dame will visit the National Technical University of Athens to work on collaborative research in earthquake engineering to enhance the resilience of communities to seismic hazards.