I graduated from Athens College and was admitted to the Department of Electrical Engineering at NTUA in 1981, graduating in 1985. Since this was accomplished in four years — an unprecedented feat at the time — I clearly remember Professor Manolis Protonotarios, who was then Dean and supported me in that effort. In 1985 I went to MIT for graduate studies and in 1988 received my doctorate in Applied Mathematics and Operations Research. In 1988 I joined the faculty of the MIT Sloan School of Management and have remained a member of the MIT academic staff ever since. Today I serve as Associate Dean for Business Analytics and Vice Provost for the MIT Open Learning Initiative.

I have supervised 98 doctoral students and currently collaborate with 24. I am a member of the US National Academy of Engineering and have been an entrepreneur for the past 30 years.

I received an outstanding education at NTUA. At that time I had professors such as Christos Papadimitriou, Mihalis Yannakakis and Leo Guibas in Computer Science, Fotis Nanopoulos in Probability, and Filippos Serafeim in Electromagnetics, among many other exceptional faculty members. Beyond imparting their profound knowledge of their subjects, they inspired me to pursue a research career. When I arrived in the Mathematics Department at MIT, I realised I had received a broad and deep education that decisively helped me in the graduate-level courses at MIT. Moreover, many of my fellow students at NTUA were outstanding. I vividly remember a research seminar with Yannis Spiliotis in Probability, as well as the excellent supervision of Fontas Papakonstantinou on my diploma thesis in Operations Research.

To this day I maintain close collaboration with NTUA Professor Giorgos Stamou and have founded a company in Greece that employs ten NTUA graduates.

The NTUA I knew laid the foundations of my future path and I will be forever grateful. NTUA is a jewel of Greek university education.