Dr. Konstadinos A. Sfetsos, Ph.D. Physics '93, has been awarded simultaneously two prestigious fellowships in 1996: the European Union Fellowship, and the CERN Fellowship. Professor Itzhak Bars writes, "These are extremely competitive and clearly show that Sfetsos has been doing outstanding work."
The European Union fellowship is awarded to young scientists from the fifteen european member countries who are willing to work for two years in a scientific institute in another member country except their own which in Kostas' case is Greece.
The Center for European Nuclear Research or CERN fellowship, centered in Geneva, Switzerland, is for young scientists from CERN member countries. Both fellowships are awarded by an anonymous committee of senior leading scientists and are based on the accomplishments and potential of the candidate. Due to mandatory army service in Greece, Dr. Sfetsos will not be making use of this fellowship until July 1, 1997. Dr. Bars is on sabbatical at CERN until August 1997. Kostas' time there will not overlap long enough to have much time with him, but he hopes to start a collaboration.
Kostas Sfetsos transferred from the Virginia Poly Institute to the USC Department of Physics and Astronomy in 1988 as a graduate student where he worked closely with Professor Itzhak Bars. Kostas says, "Professor Bars was one of my main reasons for transferring. He has an outstanding reputation among the senior theoretical high energy physicists in the world. He is always involved in interesting problems and knows how to make unique contributions." During Kostas' USC residency, he and Dr. Bars collaborated on seven publications.
After graduating in August 1993, Konstadinos moved to the Netherlands where he held a post doctoral position in the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the Utrecht University. Here, he gained valuable experience working with top scientists, including Prof. G.'t Hooft, Prof. B. de Wit and Prof. E. Verlinde. While at Utrecht, Kostas was joined by his wife, Maria Stavridi (Ph.D. Biomedical Engineering, USC) who also held a post-doctoral position at the university in the Biophysics Institute. On March 22, 1996, Maria and Kostas had a son. During this past year, Kostas has focused his research on the interplay between duality symmetries and supersymmetry in string theory.