Prof. Athanasiadis expertise lies with artifcial intelligence, machine learning, and knowledge engineering, and their applications in the green life sciences.

He holds a PhD (2005, cum laude) in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. Before joining Wageningen, he was faculty at Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence (IDSIA), University of Lugano, Switzerland, and with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Dept, at the Democritus University of Thrace, Greece.

Prof. Athanasiadis is/was the co-principal investigator for several major European and national grants related artificial intelligence in agriculture and ecology (AgrifoodTEF, PHENET, SmartDroplets, LTER-LIFE, CYBELE, Dragon). He served for more than 15 years as an Editor of the Elsevier journal Environmental Modelling and Software, and has long experience in reviewing for primary AI venues, including NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, IEEE WIC, etc.

Currently, he works with a team of twelve PhDs and postdocs at Wageningen University on advancing AI to eradicate hunger. He leads the WUR research theme on data-driven discoveries in a changing climate, and AgML, the international community effort of AgMIP towards benchmarking machine learning in agricultural modelling.