Georgios Pastras

Dr. Georgios Pastras was born in Patras, Greece, in 1980. He received his B.S. in Physics from the University of Patras in 2002 and his Ph.D. in Physics from Harvard University in 2009. He has held postdoctoral research positions at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), the University of Patras, and the National Technical University of Athens. He was the principal investigator of the research program "HAPPEN" at the National Center for Scientific Research "Demokritos" and currently holds postdoctoral research appointments at the Laboratory for Manufacturing Systems and Automation (LMSA) in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Aeronautics at the University of Patras, as well as at the Department of Physics of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He is also a research scientist at Qubitech.

Dr. Pastras is deeply committed to bridging the gap between science and technology and to fostering effective communication between researchers in these fields. As such, his work spans a wide range of disciplines, including theoretical high-energy physics, cosmology, engineering, applied physics, and computer science.

In theoretical physics, his research has explored metastable supersymmetry breaking, little Higgs models, black hole thermodynamics, tunneling phenomena in quantum field theory, Pohlmeyer reduction, and classical string solutions. In recent years, he has focused primarily on quantum entanglement in field theory and cosmology, holographic entanglement entropy, the interplay between entanglement and gravity, and the hypothesis that gravity may emerge as a quantum entropic force.

His engineering research centers on energy efficiency, the modeling of non-conventional manufacturing processes, robotics, and, more recently, additive manufacturing. In applied physics, he studies spatial photonic Ising machines (SPIMs), while in computer science, he specializes in post-quantum cryptography.

Dr. Pastras has a strong teaching record, having served as a teaching fellow at Harvard University for nine semesters. He has twice received the "Certificate of Distinction in Teaching" from the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning and was awarded the "Harold T. White Prize for Excellence in the Teaching of Physics" by the Harvard Physics Department. He is the author of two monographs and has published over forty research articles in international scientific journals. He has supervised two Ph.D. theses and has received research funding from the Greek State Scholarship Foundation (2017--2019) and the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (HFRI) (2019--2021).