Scholarships 2021-22: Welcoming new arrivals to the City of Tomorrow
Onassis Foundation Scholarship Program results announced for the upcoming academic year.
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This year, as every year since 1978, we are again welcoming new inhabitants to the City of Tomorrow – the 88 new Onassis Foundation scholars. We are supporting them on their journeys, so that they are free to open up new avenues with their ideas – to expand the sciences we know, and the ones we will come to know. Our 88 new scholars, together with another 7,317 inhabitants, will be taking steps forward and changing society for the better.
This year’s scholars have inspired us with their vision and their thinking. For the academic year 2021-22, we have awarded a total of 88 scholarships: 76 for international study (41 for postgraduate degrees and 35 for doctoral studies) and 12 for postgraduate studies in Greece. Our selection – which took academic excellence as its criterion – was made by leading Greek and international scientists, university professors, and academics within the framework of a merit-based evaluation. This year, an emphasis was placed on academic fields that have emerged to meet the needs of the present day, such as epidemiology, the economics of innovation, and urban / environmental planning, as well as future-facing fields, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, molecular biomedicine and bioinnovation, and computational linguistics. The selected fields and specializations all have connections to Onassis Foundation areas of action, with their focus on innovation and breakthrough technologies. It is our hope that this City of Tomorrow will grow larger with each passing year, filling with innovative new ideas and beautiful minds.
The scholarship results are available:
There is an invisible city that appears on no map, and yet is everywhere. This city, whose foundations were laid in 1978, continues to be built. But in place of buildings, it has restless ideas, words and algorithms. And in place of roads, it has the sciences we know – medicine, law, biology, and the like – and the sciences we will come to know – biomedicine, bioethics, artificial intelligence, and the economics of innovation. This city is inhabited by people who excel, create, and break new ground, applying themselves so that our societies can take steps forward. It is a city of 7,450 inhabitants: all of them Onassis Foundation Scholars.
Meet some of the latest arrivals to the city of tomorrow:
Kleio-Aikaterini Zervidi
As part of her doctoral studies at Imperial College London in the UK, she is looking into hybrid systems for CO2 capture from the air. Her pioneering research seeks to combat the climate crisis.
Konstantinos Sitaropoulos
His doctoral studies at the University of Texas at Austin in the US concern the creation of a reliable system for the timely detection of underground water mains leaks through the use of above-ground acoustic sensors. His research seeks to solve a chronic problem faced by many cities, one that has major economic and environmental repercussions, and at times catastrophic outcomes.
Asterios Tsiourvas
Currently undertaking his doctoral studies in Operations Research at MIT in the US, his research proposal concerns the creation of machine learning and optimization algorithms for health sector and personalized treatment applications.
Margarita Amaxopoulou
As part of her doctoral studies at King’s College London in the UK, she is researching the transnational regulation of artificial intelligence, and its effects on international relations. Her project is in a position to provide us with useful information with regard to strategy formulation approaches for dealing with artificial intelligence on an international level.
