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Last updated 10th March 2023

Born in Greece, Grigoris studied computer science at Karlsruhe (Germany), and in 1989 he completed his PhD at Osnabrueck (Germany) on program verification. After spending a few more years in Osnabrueck, he emigrated to Australia in 1994, where he stayed until 2001. During that period he moved up the academic ladder, becoming Professor at Griffith University in 1999. His research in that period was mainly concerned with issues of knowledge representation.

Australia was nice and offered ample research funding possibilities, but it was too far away from home, so he decided to return to Europe. After a short stay in Bremen, he became Professor at the University of Crete in 2002, where he spent the next 10 years. From 2004 to 2011 he was, in addition, Head of the Information Systems Laboratory at FORTH, the top-rated research institution in Greece.

During that decade, he expanded his research interests to include semantic technologies, as well as a number of application areas. He was happy to see significant recognition of  his work, becoming an ECCAI Fellow in 2006; and to witness great impact through the publication of his book “A Semantic Web Primer” which has become the standard textbook in this area and has been translated to Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Spanish. And privately, he found someone who was silly enough to marry him, and became a happy, but sometimes annoyed, father of two sons.

A combination of family preferences and general developments in Greece led to his decision to move once more, and join Huddersfield in 2012. He is determined to continue his research on semantic and knowledge technologies and their applications, seeking to take advantage of existing national funding opportunities and the international outreach of the UK. At the same time, he hopes  that, by bringing in his research expertise and network of research collaborations across Europe and beyond, he will make a significant contribution towards Huddersfield’s  continued strengthening in terms of research quality, impact and reputation.