George A. Garinis, Professor of Genetics at the department of Biology, the University of Crete will coordinate two large international research networks on ageing and DNA damage at the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology (IMBB) at the Foundation of Research and Technology (FORTH).

A pioneering cross-disciplinary scientific synergy has been founded in Crete. Twelve Greek academic and research institutions under the coordination of the Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH) have joined forces challenging the exploration of new horizons in the Economy of Knowledge; light is the key instrument in this initiative.

A new Institute, the only in Greece dedicated exclusively to Astrophysics, will soon join the big family of the Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH), becoming its 7th Institute, after a legislation voted in the Greek Parliament on February 26th 2018.

Assistant Professor Xenofontas Dimitropoulos, Affiliated Researcher at ICS-FORTH, ERC Starting Grant holder, was awarded an ERC Proof of Concept grant during the last round of the application process for the PHILOS project.

Researchers at IESL-FORTH, Attosecond Science and Technology Laboratory, led by Dr. Paraskevas Tzallas, in collaboration with scientists at the Department of Physics, University of Crete and the Max Planck Institute for Microstructure Physics, Halle, Germany, have developed a novel quantum optical approach for describing interactions of intense electromagnet fields with atoms. This approach, published recently in Nature Communications [1], has led to the development of a quantum spectrometer in the extreme-ultraviolet (XUV) spectral range. The work unifies two, until recently disjoint fields, quantum optics and strong-field physics and paves the way for a new era of experimental investigations of strong-field laser matter interaction in the context of quantum optics.