Eleftherios Economou is a Research Fellow at IESL-FORTH and Emeritus Professor at the Physics Dept. of the University of Crete. He received his PhD in 1969 from the Physics Dept. of the University of Chicago, USA. He was Professor at the University of Virginia (from 1969 to 1981), at the University of Athens (from 1978 to 1981), and at the Physics Dept. of the University of Crete (from 1981 to 2007). He was the founder (together with colleagues) of the Foundation for Research and TechnologyHellas (FORTH) and is an Honorary chair of FORTH. From 1983 to 2004 he served as the first president of FORTH.

He received honorary doctorate degrees from the Polytechnic of Grenoble (1994) and the University of Ioannina (2004). He was a member of the team which received in 2005 the Descartes Prize (the highest E.U. award for cooperative research).

He received an award from the Foundation of the Greek Parliament (2010) and the Commander of the Order of Phoenix by the President of the Greek Republic (2013). He has a strong research output on the properties of disordered systems, high Tc superconductors, amorphous semiconductors, and wave propagation in random media. In recent years he has been focused mostly on the study of elastic and electromagnetic wave propagation in complex media, mainly photonic crystals, phononic crystals and metamaterials. He is among the initiators of the field of phononic crystals, where his work has been very well received.

He has 292 publications in refereed journals and another 109 as chapters in books and encyclopedias. He has written twelve books and has given many invited talks in conferences and at Universities/Institutes. He has been cited more than 14900 times in SCI journals (WoS).

email: economou@admin.forth.gr
Researcher ID page: http://www.researcherid.com/rid/E-6374-2010