P. Takis Mathiopoulos received the Diploma in Electrical Engineering from the University of Patras, Greece, in 1979, the Master of Engineering (M.Eng.) degree with a specialization in Microwaves and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Ottawa with a specialization in Digital Telecommunications, in 1989, both in Canada.
Since 2014, he holds the position of Professor of Digital Communications, in the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, University of Athens. He was, from 2000 - 2014, with the Institute for Space Applications and Remote Sensing (ISARS) at the National Observatory of Athens, in Penteli, Athens, Greece. NOA is a publicly funded R&D organization and is the oldest research institution of modern Greece established in 1854. From 2000-2005 he was the Director of the Institute. In this capacity, Prof. Mathiopoulos was responsible for the daily operation of the Institute as well as its scientific management. Its main objective was to carry out R&D projects in these fields, which include Remote Sensing, Telecommunications, the Magnetosphere and the Ionosphere. As ISARS’ Director, he has made notable contributions to the scientific advancement and significant expansion of the Institute, including tripling its personnel and PhD students as well as doubling the external funding. He founded and supervised a new group with R&D activities in the field of “Wireless Communications,” with emphasis on research dealing with physical layer problems for both satellite and terrestrial system applications. Within five years this group has been recognized as a leading research group not only in Greece but also in the European and international satellite telecommunication research community. The group has collaborated through national, European and international RD projects (with a total budget of 3MEuros), with academic institutions, industrial and governmental organization, and some industry.
From 1981-1986, he was with Raytheon Canada Ltd. working in the Department of Radar and Avionics, first as R&D engineer and then as a system engineer, and was involved with the design and operation of DVOR and DME air navigational equipment. He was also responsible for the installation of these equipment in Indonesia and Malaysia and has thought courses related to the operation and the debugging of these equipment in the field.
As a researcher, Prof. Mathiopoulos is an internationally recognized expert with a proven track record for original research contributions and in the field of wireless telecommunications for terrestrial and satellite systems and networks. In the early 80’s he has accumulated 4 years of industrial (hands-on and managerial) experience at Raytheon Canada Ltd., where he was working in the areas of air-navigational and satellite communications. In 1989 he joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), University of British Columbia (UBC) as an Assistant Professor where he was a faculty member for 14 years and from 2000 - 2003 he was holding the rank of Full Professor. He continued his affiliation with UBC as an Adjunct Professor until 2008. He has supervised the thesis of 23 graduate students (12 Ph.D. and 15 M.A.Sc.) four of whom hold faculty positions in Canada, USA and Greece.
Over the years, Prof. Mathiopoulos has supervised university and industry based R&D groups and has successfully acted as technical manager for large R&D Canadian and European projects. His early work in the 80’s in the field of digital telecommunications dealt with point-to-point and point-to-multi-point high capacity terrestrial and satellite digital communication systems. Since 1990, his research activities have shifted towards mobile and personal telecommunication systems and networks. His scientific contributions over the last 25 years in the general field of digital wireless communication systems and networks (for terrestrial and satellite systems) cover a wide area of research topics dealing with mainly their physical and access layers as well as some networking aspects. Specific research activities include communications over fading and interference environments, channel characterization and measurements, HF-communications, modulation and coding techniques, network coding techniques, SIMO/MIMO, UWB, OFDM, and software/cognitive radios, sensor and ad-hoc networks, wireless networks, privacy and security, software/cognitive radios, 4/5G, NOMA, as well as green communications. He has also some secondary research activities in the fields of information technology as well as in remote sensing and photogrammetry. In these areas, he has authored or co-authored 125 archival journal papers published mainly in various IEEE Transactions, having more than 2500 citations (ISI), and 130 papers published in international conference proceedings, as well as one book and several chapters in books. Two of his conference papers have received, in 2008 and 2011, best paper awards.
Prof. Mathiopoulos has acted numerous times as a consultant for many industrial organizations and various governmental agencies all over the world. Since 1993, he has served on a regular basis as a scientific advisor and technical expert for the European Commission (EC) for the ACTS and IST programs. In this capacity, he has been appointed by the EC in numerous high level advisory, evaluation and auditing panels in the technical areas of telecommunications, information technology and electronic commerce and publishing. In 2000 he has been appointed as national representative of the Hellenic Republic on the Space Advisory Group (SAG) of the European Commission. He also serves as a national representative in the COST Actions 271 and 273. From 1993 - 2006, Prof. Mathiopoulos was the Editor for Wireless Personal Communications of the IEEE Transactions on Communications. He also serves or had served in the past on the Editorial Board of several other IEEE and IET journals.
While on faculty at UBC he was awarded the ASI and Killam Fellowships. He has been a member of the Technical Program Committees of numerous international telecommunication conferences and has delivered numerous invited presentations, including plenary lectures, and has taught many short courses all over the world. He has served as a member of the TPC of more than 50 international (mainly IEEE) conferences for some of which he has acted as Vice-Chair. He has delivered numerous plenary lectures and has taught regular and short-courses all over the world.
In September 2005, one of his IEEE TCOM publications has been acknowledged from the Editors of the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (Special Issue on Differential and Noncoherent Wireless Communications) as one of the four most influential papers (out of the 1000+) published on this subject of the last four decades. In their editorial comment his paper is referred to as “real breakthrough” and as a “seminal paper”. It should be noted that for the first time in 1989, Profs. Makrakis and Mathiopoulos have proposed the term “Multiple Differential Detection” for the optimal receiver in fading channels. This term has now been recognized as the most generic term for maximum likelihood block-by-block detection in fading channels.
In December 2010 and for a period of 5 years he was appointed by the General Secretariat for Research and Technology of Greece as National Greek Delegate to the European Space Agency (ESA) Joint Communication Board (JBC) which is responsible and approves ESA’s Workplan for the Telecommunications and Navigation with a yearly budget of 2 Billion Euros. He is also appointed for the same time period as the National Greek Representative to the European Commission’s COST ICT program.
In June 2006, he was elected to the Steering Board of the Integral Satellite Initiative (ISI), which is an European industry led action forum designed to bring together all aspects related to satellite communications. In December 2008, the President of Southwest Jiaotong University of the PR of China, has appointed him for a period of five years a Guest Professor at the Key Laboratory of Information, Coding and Transmission of the Institute of Mobile Communications. More recently (2014-2017), he has been appointed by the Government of PR of China as a Senior Foreign Expert for Yangzhou University where he was a Visiting Professor at its School of Information Engineering. Additionally, he has been appointed by the President of Keio University from 2015-2016 and 2017-2018 as a Guest (Global) Professor in the Department of Information and Computer Science under the Top Global University Project of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) Government of Japan.
In December 2017, he was presented by the IEEE ComSoc with its “2017 Satellite and Space Communication Service Award” given to him for his outstanding contributions, over the last 20 years, in the Satellite Communications field. This award is the first time it was given to a Greek researcher since its inception in 2002.
Further details on the award can be found in this link.