Personal Site: http://www.ece.northwestern.edu/~stsaft

Professor Sotirios A. Tsaftaris was born in Thessaloniki Greece in 1978. He currently is a Research Assistant Professor at Northwestern University, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He received his PhD and MSc from Northwestern University in June 2006 and 2003 respectively under the guidance of Professor Aggelos Katsaggelos. He received his Diploma in 2000 from the Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. His thesis title was "Copyright protection of MPEG 1 and 2 Video Sequences using Digital watermarking techniques" and was supervised by Prof. Michael-Gerasimos Strintzis. In 1995 he graduated from the Experimental high school of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.

He was awarded the Murphy Fellowship of Northwestern University and the Alexander S. Onassis Postgraduate Scholarship from the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation. He was also awarded the top class award by the Technical Chamber of Greece (TEE).

After his Bachelor's degree, he worked for a year as a researcher for the Informatics and Telematics Institute of the Center for Research and Technology - Hellas. He has published many papers on DNA computing and digital watermarking. In parallel, he was working as a technology consultant for Gnosi Anaptyxiaki and he also participated as project leader in the start-up company Multimedia Lab of Thessaloniki.

He is a member of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, the International Society of Nanoscale Science, Computation, and Engineering, the IEEE, the Hellenic Association of Mechanical & Electrical Engineers (HAMEE) and the Technical Chamber of Greece (TEE).

His main research interests are DNA computing, bioinformatics, computational biology, medical and molecular imaging, nanotechnology, and commercialization of those. He is also interested in Digital Watermarking, International Standards, Image and Video Coding, Video Editing, Computer Networking.