Giorgos Papanastasiou
Academy of Athens, Greece
Short Bio
Giorgos Papanastasiou is an Associate Research Professor (Researcher rank B in the Greek system) at the Mathematics Research Centre of the Academy of Athens, a position he has held since 2025. He is an expert in multimodal artificial intelligence, specializing in generative AI, machine learning, causal AI, medical image analysis, and mathematical modeling. His work now deeply focuses on advancing AI for Science, specifically by developing novel mechanisms to embed physics-, chemistry-, and biology-information directly into AI models. His core focus is on bridging the gap between fundamental research and impactful industrial applications.
He also serves as the Lead Researcher at the Archimedes Unit of the Athena Research Centre (since 2023) and is an Associated Faculty member of the Biomedical Research Foundation of the Academy of Athens (since 2024).
Prior to these roles, he was a Research Scientist in AI at Pfizer, where he led the development of Generative AI and Causal AI methodologies for multiple critical projects. His work spanned from drug discovery and real-world data analyses to novel clinical trial design. He previously held faculty positions as an Assistant Professor at the University of Essex (UK, 2020-2022) and as a Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh (UK, 2016-2020).
He obtained his PhD and MSc by Research from the University of Edinburgh, an MSc from the National Technical University of Athens, and an MEng from the School of Engineering at the University of Ioannina.
He has successfully attracted significant funding from diverse bodies. He was the Principal Investigator (PI) on grants from Athersys and the “Archimedes” grant (from NextGenerationEU). He served as the Work Package PI Lead on the major OPTIMA IHI project (Horizon Europe). He has also been a Co-Investigator (Co-I) on projects funded by the MRC and Hangshou City Council, and a recipient of support from EPSRC, GE Healthcare, GlaxoSmithKline (as Research Fellow), and the prestigious BHF (PhD studentship).
He has led the development and submission of 23 successful grant applications, cumulatively attracting over 3,000,000 € in direct funding.
As of November 2025, he possesses over 115 scientific publications, including numerous articles in high-impact, peer-reviewed journals such as npj Digital Medicine, Nature Communications, npj Imaging, Medical Image Analysis, Information Fusion, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics (where he also serves as an Associate Editor), IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, and NeuroImage, as well as conference papers at top-tier international conferences like NeurIPS and MICCAI.
Giorgos’s work continues to drive innovation at the intersection of AI foundational advancements and scientific applications, tackling complex challenges in areas ranging from drug discovery and clinical trial optimization to early disease diagnosis and personalized medicine across cardiovascular, oncological, neurological, and rare diseases.
Giorgos welcomes outstanding PhD students, Master's/undergraduate students, and Post-doctoral Fellows to join his research efforts in both fundamental theoretical projects and translational applications. Prospective PhD students interested in pursuing research related to his expertise are encouraged to contact him by e-mail at: gpapanastasiou [at] academyofathens.gr.
