Gelina Harlaftis, Professor of Maritime History in the Department of History and Archaeology of the University of Crete and head of the Centre of Maritime History at the Institute for Mediterranean Studies of FORTH, was unanimously re-elected Director of the Institute on 23 June 2021.

The Medical School, the Department of Computer Science, the Department of Materials Science and Technology of the University of Crete, the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the Technical University of Crete, and the Foundation for Research and Technology -Hellas (FORTH) are jointly organize the Postgraduate Program in "Biomedical Engineering" in the framework of the Law 4485/2017 (Government Gazette 1122B '/2-4-2020), which leads to a MSc Diploma in "Biomedical Engineering".

Charalambos Makridakis, Professor of Numerical Analysis at the University of Crete and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Sussex, was re-elected Director of the Institute of Applied and Computational Mathematics of FORTH, on June 3, 2021.

Dr. Dimitris Plexousakis, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Crete and Head of the Information Systems Laboratory (ISL) of the Institute of Computer Science (ICS), was re-elected Director of the Institute on May 18, 2021. His official appointment is expected in the next few weeks.

The Institute of Computer Science of the Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas (FORTH) offers museums and cultural heritage organizations the opportunity to acquire the required digital knowledge, and make use of the modern digital tools in order to display their exhibits.

On April 12, 1986, members of the academic community of the University of Crete and FORTH, along with government representatives, officials and many people from all over Crete, met at a peak of Psiloritis, 20 km from the historic Municipality of Anogia, to celebrate a unique event: the inauguration of the Skinakas Observatory and the formal commencement of operation of its first telescope, with a 30cm diameter mirror.

On Friday April 2nd 2021, a Memorandum of Cooperation was signed between the Institute of Petroleum Research (IPR) of the Foundation for Research and Technology (FORTH) and the Institute of Physics of the Earth's Interior and Geohazards - an academic unit of the Hellenic Mediterranean University Research Center (HMURC).

Until now, Europe has had two major collaborative networks for ground-based astronomy, one in the optical domain (OPTICON) and the other in the radio-wave domain (RadioNet). These two networks, having successfully served their respective communities over the past twenty years, now come together to form Europe’s largest ground-based astronomy collaborative network. In Greece the network includes the Institute of Astrophysics FORTH and the National Observatory of Athens. During the ORP kick-off meeting on Tuesday 23 March 2021, the Director of the Institute of Astrophysics, Prof. Vassilis Charmandaris, was unanimously elected as Vice Chair of the Board of Directors of the network, having served as Chair of the Board of Directors of the OPTICON network for the past 2 years. The project is coordinated by CNRS (France), together with the University of Cambridge (UK) and the Max-Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) (Germany) and it involves astronomers from 15 European countries, Australia and South Africa, amounting to 37 institutions.

On March 23, 2021, a Memorandum of Cooperation was signed between HHRM and IPR in areas related to the detection and extraction of hydrocarbons.

Advent Technologies (https://www.advent.energy/), an innovative company in the sectors of fuel cells and hydrogen technology, announces its entry into the NASDAQ Stock Exchange in New York on February 5, 2021, following merger with AMCI Acquisition Corp.