April 23, 2024 As a side effect of the 1st Greek ERA chair meeting Panos Tsakalides and Alexis organized at FORTH in September 2023, portraits of all 7 Greek ERA chairs were published in the national Greek newspaper Kathimerini.

April 2, 2024 Alexis and three members of the BCG sister group at HITS contributed to the largest ever phylogenetic analysis of bird evolution that was just published in Nature. Numerous open-source tools enabling research in evolutionary biology, developed by us, were used for this study.

HITS press release and press portal uptake1 and uptake2. Short on-line news item about bird evolution.

FORTH press release - Greek version. Local Cretan press uptake.

An excellent article by Greek science journalist Vasiliki Michopoulou on the broader context of our research in Heidelberg and Heraklion.

An interview on local Cretan TV channel about Bioinformatics, bird evolution, and quantifying uncertainty.
Watch the interview on

March 13, 2024 Our PhD student Lucia joined researchers from the natural history museum of Crete on a field trip in the Lasithi prefecture to collect beatle samples.

January 31, 2024 Alexis presented the new outreach material on AirTraffic Control to the pupils of the primary school of Sivas located in the south of the Heraklion prefecture.

January 24, 2024 In spring term, Alexis will be teaching a new graduate seminar on "Reproducibility in Bioinformatics" at the computer science department of the University of Crete.

Unfortunately, this will not be a joint UoC-KIT course this time as the UoC spring semester and the KIT summer semester hardly overlap.

January 16, 2024 While initially only a smaller BCG inaugural scientific workshop was planned it evolved (it's a long story...) into a conference that Alexis is now jointly organizing and co-financing together with some colleagues from abroad. Please consult the legend2024 conferenace web-site for all details.

January 8, 2024 - The first teaching cycle of the joint UoC-KIT Master level course on "Introduction to Bioinformatics for Computer Scientsists" was completed in the last week before Christmas.

As the course could always be attended on-line via Zoom, Alexis decided to open it up to a broader audience outside KIT and UoC via his networks.

This attracted interesting and surpising guest hearers, such as, for instance, a PhD student and a staff scientist from the Hellenic Center for Marine Research as well as Ümit Atlamaz, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul.

December 4, 2023 - All current members of the Biodiversity Computing Group at ICS-FORTH are visiting the Computational Molecular Evolution (CME) sister group at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS) these days to tighten the links between the groups.

The picture shows all BCG and almost all CME group members in front of the HITS building. The picture also includes Panos Ioannidis who joined BCG as a PostDoc on December 1st 2023.

November 22, 2023 Alexis has been included in the Clarivate analytics highly cited researchers list for the 8th consecutive year.

There is a press release by by ICS-FORTH and a respective press release by HITS as well as the uptake on the AlphaGalileo and idw scientific news portals.

The list has also been mentioned by Greek media.

October 2, 2023 The first BCG PostDoc, Giorgos Koutsovoulos joins FORTH. Giorgos spent the largest part of his academic career abroad and has now returned to conduct research in Greece after 14 years.

September 25, 2023 The joint simultaenous class on "Introduction to Bioinformatics for Computer Scientists" started today featuring a meet and greet session with the Cretan students. This provided a good opportunity to test the Zoom streaming from Uoc -> KIT which worked smoothly out of the box.

Actual lectures will start on October 23 with the begininng of the winter term at KIT.

August 12, 2023 On Sunday, June 12 Alexis and the rest of the executive board of Klimatogi, the Cultural Committe of Listaros village organized an outreach talk by Anastasia Markomichelaki, associate professor at the philology department of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki on "Poetry and Theatre in Venetian Crete: 14th - 17th century"

Her talk was framed by the musicians: Michalis Staurakakis, Giorgis Zacharioudakis, and Kostas Kyritsakis.

The goal of this event that attracted over 100 citizens to Listaros was to better inform the broad public about the important role of this epoch for modern Greek litterature.

July 31, 2023 Together with Panos Tsakalides (Coordinator of the TALOS ERA chair project at ICS-FORTH) and Dimitris Plexousakis (director of ICS-FORTH), we are finalizing the preparations for the first meeting of all 7 Greek ERA chairs that will take place at FORTH in Heraklion on September 26.

The meeting will feature a closed session for establishing an initial network between all 7 ERA chairs and coordinators as well as a public project presentation session with policy makers.

July 3, 2023 Alexis gave a talk on "Why Greece needs a dedicated female researchers/professors program" in the context of the hybrid seminar for gender dimension in research @FORTH in Horizon Europe.

Alexis came up with the idea of establishing a dedicated female researcher/professors program in Greece following the example of numerous other EU countries and started discussing this with some of his female academic friends in Greece.

In close collaboration with Maria Klapa, president of the gender equality committee at FORTH, we now strive to prepare a respective policy proposal, ideally involving all gender equality committees in Greek Academia.

June 11, 2023 On Sunday, June 11 Alexis and the rest of the executive board of Klimatogi, the Cultural Committe of Listaros village organized an outreach talk by Dr. Charalambos Fassoulas, director of the geodiversity department of the Natural History Museum of Crete on the "Geotectonic conditions and movements in the wider Messara area".

The goal was to better inform the broad public about the tectonic particularities of the Messara region, in light of the May 18, 2023 magnitude 5 earthquake whose epicenter was located approximately 3 km east of Listaros village.

May 24, 2023 KIT Master student Luise Häuser is back in Crete to present work on "General and Language-specific Aspects of Phylogenetic Inference" in a joint talk with Alexis at the workshop on "Computational Phylogenetics and language (Pre)history: Achievements, Challenges and Prospects" organized by our collaborator from the linguistics department Prof. Elena Anagnostopoulou.

May 21, 2023 The two day satellite workshop at the Hellenic Center for Marine Research funded by EMBO in conjunction with the 13th summer school on Computational Molecular Evolution (CoME) was a full success.

The workshop was organized by Tereza Manousaki, Cilia Antoniou (both at HCMR) and Alexandros Stamatakis (FORTH).

Apart from talks contributed by CoME lecturers and teaching assistants (early career scientists) there were contributed talks by members of the local research community in Crete (HCMR, FORTH, NHMC), but also from other parts of Greece as well as from the US (via Zoom).

A substantial fraction of talks was contributed by early career scientists.

Likewise, attendees were not only from Crete, but also from Thessaloniki, Italy, and Germany. Upon popular request the workshop was also streamed via Zoom and we spotted attendees from Austria and Spain.

May 12, 2023 International selection panel member for the ERA chair project as well as project advisory board member Nick Goldman is in Crete to teach at the 13th summer school on computational molecular evolution, but also to chat with Alexis about progress and potential collaborations within the framework of the ERA chair project.

April 28, 2023 Reviving old networks and establishing new ones in the framework of a talk at the Biomedical Sciences Research Center (BSRC) Alexander Fleming in Athens, Greece.

In the context of this visit Alexis also met with the BSRC ERA chair George Skretas to discuss potential reforms and synergies and plan a meeting of all 7 Greek ERA chairs.

March 31, 2023 - with his colleague and friend Iasmi Stathi from the Natural History Museum of Crete, Alexis visited the Role Model Gymnasium of Heraklion (Πρότυπο Γυμνάσιο Ηρακλείου) to present the dedicated program on The Aegean Archipelago: a living laboratory of evolutionary biology to pupils and teachers.

March 1st, 2023 - Alexis gave a guest lecture in a graduate level course on "Parallel Computing in Bioinformatics" (ECE 284) at the University of California at San Diego entitled "Optimizing and Parallelizing Phylogenetic Likelihood Calculations".

The lecture was also streamed via Zoom to ICS-FORTH.

Feb 20, 2023 - A Bachelor thesis supervised by Alexis at KIT investigating the question if there is a correlation between code quality and the usage of English swear words in open source code written in C on github (there seems to be a correlation) has stirred some media interest.

The findings of the thesis have been covered in a German, a Greek, a Danish news portal, in the local newspaper of Crete, and in the US based technology-focused news portal Ars Technica.

The Bachelor thesis also made it to a popular science broadcast in German (around minute 41:22).

The code quality score distributions over C source code repositories with and without swearwords are shown on the right.

Feb 9, 2023 - SoftWipe is an open source tool for checking the adherence of scientific code written in C/C++ to coding standards by computing an overall quality score that was developed by Alexis' group in Germany.

To raise awareness about the importance of good SW engineering practices and to get to know the programming population (Masters and PhD students as well as PostDocs) at ICS-FORTH better, Alexis initiated the SoftWipe score competition. The programming population can submit their open-source codes for evaluation with SoftWipe and the programmer with the highest score (cleanest code) will then get invited by Alexis for lunch or dinner.

Alexis will also give an informal talk about SoftWipe for the programming population at ICS-FORTH in March 2023.

Feb 1, 2023 - As in every second year since 2010, we are organizing our summer school on Computational Molecular Evolution in Crete at the Hellenic Center for Marine Research (HCMR).

The European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) who is the main sponsor of this course now also offers additional funding for satellite events in conjunction wih the school such that the local research community can profit more from the course. Together with former course participant Dr. Tereza Manousaki (now a junior PI at HCMR) and school co-organizer Dr. Aglaia Antoniou (also at HCMR) we are organizing a two-day satellite workshop on "Biodiversity Computing", immediately after the end of the summer school. Some lecturers of the school will stay to also present their research and interact with the local community at this workshop.

Feb 1, 2023 - In December 2022, Alexis Stamatakis got re-elected into the executive board of the Cultural Committee of Listaros village - Klimatogi, the village where he lives. Being part of this board means that there is direct and immediate communication with citizens of the village and neighboring villages in southern Crete (Messara region).

In addition, Klimatogi has initiated a series of summer seminars on science for the broader public. The first talk was given by Prof. Nikos Poulakakis, director of the Natural History Museum of Crete (NHMC), in 2022 on the Importance of Biodiversity.

This close connection to a local community will not only serve the outreach purposes of the Biodiversity Computing Group, but also of other EU-funded projects, as the board of Klimatogi has already received a request by NHMC to organize another such event in summer 2023.

Jan 16, 2023 - Luise Häuser is the first visitor of BCG. She is a Master's student from KIT working on better understanding and characterizing natural language evolution datasets.

Her work does not only span across borders, but also across disciplines as we are collaborating with Prof. Elena Anagnostopoulou, a theoretical linguist from the University of Crete.

On the photo, Luise is enjoying her first Freddo Capuccino on the terrace of the main building of FORTH.

Dec 20, 2022 - Listen to the interview Alexis did with Campus radio at KIT (in German). It puts the project nicely into context with the 2022 Biodiversity summit in Canada.

Nov 21, 2022 - An interview with Alexis (in Greek) appeared in the local Cretan newspaper Patris.

Alexis had also previously worked with the journalist who covers scientific topics in Crete.

Nov 10, 2022 - As planned, press releases on the ERA chair grant were distributed by the three involved institutions: FORTH, HITS, and KIT.