Biography

Professor Stelios Bekiros obtained a Dipl.-Ing / BEng and an MEng in Electrical and Computer Engineering (spec. Artificial Intelligence, Software Engineering, Control Systems) from National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). He also holds an MSc in Decision Sciences (spec. Statistics, Financial Engineering, Operations Research and Information Technology) and a PhD in Big Data Econometrics & Computational Finance (ML/AI) from Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB). He has more than twenty years of postdoctoral research and teaching experience in many distinguished universities and research institutions, mainly in the Netherlands, Italy, France, UK and Greece. He was a faculty member at the European Institute for Statistics, Probability, Stochastic Operations Research and its Applications (EURANDOM), Technical University of Eindhoven, at the IPAG Business School in Paris, at the Center for Nonlinear Dynamics in Economics and Finance (CeNDEF) of the Faculty of Economics and Econometrics of the University of Amsterdam, a MWF and a three-times awarded MSCA fellow and a Visiting fellow at the Department of Economics of the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence (Italy), an expert advisor at the Hellenic Ministry of Finance and at the Centre of Planning and Economic Research (KEPE), and a member of the Decision Support Systems Laboratory of the National Technical University of Athens.

Professor Bekiros has been awarded numerous prestigious Grants including the Max Weber Fellowship - the largest postdoctoral programme in the social sciences in the world hosted by the EUI and funded by the European Commission (DG Education) – three MSCA Fellowships & Awards for pioneering work on multidisciplinary Economics, many national grants/awards by the EU, NWO, RC-AUEB/GSRT and he was appointed Scientific director of European EC projects (FP-7, H2020) at EU universities and institutions. Professor Bekiros holds Habilitations for Full Professor (Abilitazione Prima Fascia) in many sectors including Econometrics, Economic Statistics, Mathematical & Quantitative Methods in Economics, Insurance & Finance etc. He was elected in 2019 Full Professor of Economic Statistics at the Dept. of Statistical Sciences of the University of Padova, Italy.

He holds the Chair of FinAI, Econometrics & Data Science in the Faculty of Economics and Management (FEMA) at the University of Malta, and he is a Full Research Professor at the IPAG Business School (Paris, France). He is Senior Fellow of the LSE Health Center and Visiting Professor of Bioinformatics, Computational Medicine and Epigenomics at the Department of Health Policy at the London School of Economics (LSE, UK). Professor Bekiros has also worked as expert consultant in the public and private sector, and as an advisor in ministries of finance, education, and economic development. He is a senior fellow at the Rimini Centre for Economic Analysis, and Senior fellow of LABEX ReFi / Financial Regulation Lab.

IDEAS ranks Prof. Bekiros among the top 5% authors worldwide. He has been awarded three (3) prestigious Marie Skłodowska-Curie (MSCA) Fellowships by the EU (2011, 2013, 2015) for pioneering multidisciplinary work at the intersection of many scientific fields, as well as a Max Weber Fellowship in economics (2008-2009). He has participated in numerous conferences and academic seminars and has been an invited speaker in many prestigious universities and institutions. During the last twenty-five years Professor Bekiros has served as principal investigator, project manager or team member in many European and national research projects (e.g., H2020, FP7, Netherlands organization for scientific research-NWO, EU 3rd Framework Programme, EIB, EC DG-XIII/ESPRIT, EPET-II/Hellenic Ministry of Development, Cyprus RPF/Penek etc.). He strongly emphasizes multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary research through applying methodologies from Economics, Computer Science & Software Engineering, Big Data Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Physics, Engineering, Psychology etc. in studying the complexity of economic and social systems.

Professor Bekiros serves as expert evaluator for the NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada) and the NSF (USA), expert evaluator for the QS Reputation Survey - QS World University Rankings, expert evaluator/vice-chair for the European Commission (EU-REA panels, Horizon 2020), expert evaluator for the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF), a WES expert for Ifo Institute (Leibniz Institute for Economic Research, University of Munich), expert project evaluator for “la Caixa Barcelona Institute” Banking Foundation, a regular evaluator for GSRT (Hellenic Ministry of Education) as well as an international expert for Paris Region Fellowship Programme (ParisRegionFP) H2020 Orientation Service de la Recherche et Culture Scientifique.

He is Editor, Co-Editor, Assc. Editor for 20 prestigious Journals: “Chaos, Solitons & Fractals" Editor, Elsevier; "INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics (IJAA) (formerly Interfaces)" Informs; "Entropy" Journal; “Big Data Analytics”, Springer – Nature; "Journal of Economic Surveys", Wiley; "Risk Analysis", Wiley; "Journal of Forecasting", Wiley; "Computational Economics", Springer; "Econometrics" Journal; "Review of Behavioral Economics"; "Review of Behavioral Finance"; "Quantitative Finance & Economics"; "International Review of Financial Analysis", Elsevier; "Journal of International Financial Markets Institutions & Money", Elsevier; "Finance Research Letters", Elsevier; "Heliyon", Elsevier; "Emerging Markets Finance and Trade", Taylor & Francis; "International Review of Economics & Finance", Elsevier; "Alexandria Engineering Journal", Elsevier; "Forecasting" Journal etc.

His work, with presently over 300 articles, has been published in the most highly esteemed academic journals and in books and proceedings in many scientific fields. His research interests include among other Quantum Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain Technology, DeFi, FinTech, Big Data Science, Chaos and Econophysics, Epigenomics, Computational Medicine, Bioinformatics, Computational Econometrics, Extreme and Bayesian Statistics, Complex Systems, Financial Engineering, Macro-Finance, OR, Behavioral Finance etc. He acts as a referee for top journals in many scientific disciplines aside from economics, and in 2010 he was given the best reviewer award by the prestigious European Journal of Operational Research (EJOR, Elsevier), and in 2016 by the Journal of Empirical Finance (Elsevier). He is a member of the European Area Business Cycle Network (EABCN), the Econometric Society, Royal Economic Society, the European Economic Association, the Society of Financial Econometrics, the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, INFORMS, the Society for Computational Economics (SCE), the Society for Economic Measurement (SEM) and the Rimini Centre for Economic Analysis (RCEA). He is Senior Fellow at the LSE Health Center of London School of Economics (LSE).

Beyond his academic profile, Prof. Bekiros holds an MMUS in music theory and guitar performance in many genres. He served in the military, specifically in Armor (black berets) and Artillery (blue berets) Arms, where he was trained for active combatant unrestricted service I1 (equivalent 1-A USA). Stelios is inspired by the philosophies of all martial arts. He is an accomplished Black belt Dan Ju-Jitsu Master, a Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) instructor, an ISU certified Self-defense instructor by the International StreetFighting Union, and a disciple of DAS streetfighting system. He has certified seminar training in Aikido, and knowledge of armed and unarmed combat techniques in the Israeli elite special forces system of Krav-Maga.