Dr. Stamatios Krimigis was born in Chios Island, Greece. He received his B. Physics from the University of Minnesota (1961), his M.S (1963) and Ph.D (1965) in Physics from the University of Iowa, and served on the faculty there. In 1968 he moved to the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University, headed the Space Physics and Instrumentation group, became Chief Scientist in 1980, Space Department Head in 1991, and Emeritus Head in 2004. He was elected to the Academy of Athens in 2004 and occupies the Chair of “Science of Space”.
Dr. Krimigis is Principal Investigator on several NASA spacecraft, including Voyagers 1 and 2 to the Outer Planets and the Voyager Interstellar Mission, and the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and Titan. He has designed and built instruments that have flown to all eight planets, and also the New Horizons mission currently headed to Pluto. He has published more than 530 papers in journals and books on the physics of the sun, interplanetary medium, planetary magnetospheres, and the heliosphere, and is Co-editor of the book Saturn from Cassini-Huygens (Springer, 2009).
Dr. Krimigis is recipient of NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal twice, is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, American Geophysical Union, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, recipient of COSPAR’s Space Science Award in 2002, and in 1994 of the Basic Sciences Award of the International Academy of Astronautics where he chairs the Board of Trustees for Basic Sciences. He has been awarded Honorary Doctorates from the University of the Aegean (12/2009, Financial and Management Engineering), University of Athens (05/2010 Department of Physics), and International Hellenic University (5/2011, Science of Engineering). In 2010 the Council of European Aerospace Societies awarded him the CEAS Gold Medal. He served as Greece’s Alternate Head delegate to the European Space Agency (2006-2010), and is currently Chairman of Greece’s National Council of Research and Technology.
He has been the Chairman of the Scientific Council of “Maria Tsakos” Foundation since 2012.