The University of Crete announces the awarding of the “Professor Zoe Dimitriadis Prize for Excellence” for the academic year 2022-2023.

The award is granted from the proceeds of the donation of Professor Zoe Dimitriadis to postgraduate students, doctoral candidates and/or postdocs of the University of Crete for publication during the previous academic year of the award as first co-author in top tier international journals.

Dr Zoe Dimitriadis was born in Thessaloniki, Greece. She attended the Gymnasium-Lyceum of the American College “ANATOLIA” and completed her undergraduate studies at the Department of Economic Science of the Faculty of Law and Economics of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, from which she graduated with “A”. She successfully completed her postgraduate and doctoral studies in Management at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) of the University of London and her internship in Switzerland, at the Multinational Company Viscosuisse AG, a subsidiary of the Rhone Poulenc Group (now Aventis).

She served as Lecturer – Assistant Professor at the Department of Business Administration of the University of Piraeus (PA.PEI) and as Associate Professor – Professor at the Department of Business Administration of the University of Macedonia (PAMAK). After her retirement she has benefited with donations well-known charitable institutions of our country as well as some distinguished Greek Universities, in order to reward excellent students and to benefit economically weak students and people with disabilities.

The Excellence Award “Professor Zoe Dimitriades’ Prize” is accompanied by a cash prize of two thousand euros (€2,000.00) for each recipient.

The recipients of the award for the academic year 2022-23 are Dr. Emmanuel Nikoloudakis and Mrs. Konstantina Biza.

Dr. Emmanuel Nikoloudakis completed his undergraduate studies at the Department of Chemistry of the University of Crete and his postgraduate studies at the Laboratory of Bioinorganic Chemistry where he completed his PhD thesis in 2022. As part of his PhD research he visited the University of Nantes in France where he worked in the laboratory of Dr. Odobel. The research he conducted led to the paper “Nikoloudakis E., Pati P. B., Charalambidis G., Budkina D. S., Diring S., Planchat A., Jacquemin D., Vauthey E., Coutsolelos A.G., Odobel F., “Dye-Sensitized Photoelectrosynthesis Cells for Benzyl Alcohol Oxidation Using a Zinc Porphyrin Sensitizer and TEMPO Catalyst”, ACS Catal. 2021, 11, 19, 12075-12086. https://doi.org/10.1021/acscatal.1c02609, for which he was awarded the Excellence Award “Professor Zoe Demetriades Prize”.

Konstantina Biza is a PhD candidate at the Department of Computer Science, University of Crete. The subject of her thesis is the discovery and study of causal relationships. She holds a degree in Biology from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and a Master’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Department of Computer Science of the University of Crete. Her thesis entitled ‘Out-of-sample Tuning for Causal Discovery’ is about the selection of the optimal algorithm for the discovery of causal relationships from a dataset. The proposed method applies a set of causal discovery algorithms and selects the optimal one based on machine learning techniques. Co-authors and supervisors of the paper are Professor Ioannis Tsamardinos of the Department of Computer Science and Assistant Professor Sophia Triantafyllou of the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics, University of Crete.