Invited Speakers

Dr Athanassios Ganas holds a BSc degree in Geology from the National & Kapodistrian University of Athens (1986), an MSc in Structural Geology from Carleton University, Ottawa (1990) and a PhD in Geological Remote Sensing and Earth Sciences from the University of Reading, UK (1997). His expertise is Seismotectonics - Neotectonics – Fault mechanics - Remote Sensing / Earth Observation including Stress Transfer, Tectonic Geomorphology, InSAR and GNSS networks. He was a Principal Investigator for the European Space Agency (ESA) – ERS and ENVISAT missions. He has published 128 peer-reviewed papers in major international journals (JGR-Solid Earth, EPSL, GRL, GJI, Nature-SR, Tectonophysics, Geomorphology etc.). He has 2959 citations on the Scopus Index (h-index = 32). In 2018 he was a Visiting Professor at the GNSS Centre of Wuhan University (China) and at the École Normale Supérieure (Paris, France). He has received 3 Academy of Athens Awards. He has coordinated and participated in 55 international (including EU, NATO etc.) and National research projects. His funding record for the period 2000-2022 exceeds the amount of 2.0M Euros. During 2009 – 2022 he served as Member of the Greek National Committee for Seismic Hazard Assessment. Since March 2010 he is an elected Member of the Executive Board of the Geological Society of Greece (Vice-President during 2016-2018). He served as President of the Remote Sensing Committee of the Geological Society of Greece (2018-2020) and of the Tectonics Committee (2016-2018). He now serves as elected President of Geological Society of Greece (2021-2023). He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Bulletin of the Geological Society of Greece (BGSG) for 2016-2023 https://ejournals.epublishing.ekt.gr/index.php/geosociety. During 2010-2017 he served as regular member at the Board of Directors of the Earthquake Planning and Protection Organization (Athens, Greece). Since 2010 he is involved with the Geodetic Data & Products group of the EPOS https://www.epos-eu.org/ project and since 2021 is an elected member of the TCS-GNSS Consortium Board. Since March 2019 is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal Remote Sensing (MDPI). He has been invited repeatedly by foreign governments (Italy, Latvia, Cyprus, Kazakhstan, etc.) and by EU organisations (REA of EC, COST etc.) as external evaluator of research proposals. Since 2013 he has initiated and leads the NOAFAULTs project (Database of Active Faults of Greece; https://zenodo.org/record/8075517)

Dr. Hakan Tanyaş is a geotechnical engineer. He received his Ph.D. degree in Earth Sciences in 2019 from the University of Twente, Faculty of Geo-information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), Netherlands. During his Ph.D., he worked at USGS Colorado, USA, Golden office and CNR IRPI, Italy, Perugia office as a visiting scientist. In 2019, he was awarded a NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) Fellowship at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. After 2-year of postdoc experience, in 2021, he started working as Assistant Professor at ITC, University of Twente. His research primarily focuses on hazard assessment of landslides triggered by earthquakes and rainfall. He developed the first global-scale repository of earthquake-induced landslide inventories. Also, he developed a proposal with the USGS team to create a web-based platform allowing data sharing for those landslide inventories. He was involved as a co-PI and the project was funded by the Community for Data Integration, which is a dynamic community working together to grow USGS knowledge and capacity in scientific data. In 2017, he was invited to the National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, USA as part of the project and created a repository to host the digital inventories through the USGS ScienceBase platform. Using this database, he was involved in multiple research projects aiming at developing near real-time predictive models for earthquake-induced landslides. As of July 2018, the USGS introduced a new tool, called Ground Failure, providing estimates regarding the distribution of coseismic landslides in near-real-time. He also developed some tools to evaluate the quality and completeness levels of landslide inventories. In addition to earthquake-induced landslides, he has also worked on rainfall-triggered landslides. His postdoc proposal aims at upgrading NASA’s global-scale predictive model (Landslide Hazard Assessment for Situational Awareness) developed for rainfall-induced landslides. To upgrade this model, he worked on methods capturing the coupled effect of both earthquake and precipitation as landslide triggering factors. He is still working for the University of Twente and using remote sensing techniques to improve landslide hazard assessment techniques. In this context, he has been also exploiting Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar techniques in his research.