Athanasios Koutras (http://www.thanasiskoutras.com) was born in Athens, Greece (1973). He is an Associate Professor at the Electrical & Computer Engineering Department, at the University of Peloponnese. He holds a Diploma of Electrical and Computer Engineering from the ECE Department, University of Patras (1996) and a PhD from the same Department (2001). The title of his doctoral dissertation is: “Blind Separation and Recognition of Speech in a multi-simultaneous speaker environment”, supervised by Prof. George Kokkinakis. He has worked as a post-doc researcher at the Wired Communications Lab of the ECE Department (UPatras) and later he joined the Neurophysiology Unit of the Medical School of Patras, working with Prof. G. Kostopoulos in various research projects, studying human brain functionality using non-invasive techniques and digital signal processing methodologies, funded by the RIKEN Institute in Japan (2004-2006)).

He was initially elected Assistant Professor of the Department of Informatics and Mass Media of the TEI of Patras (2008-2018) and later he was a member of the Academic Stuff of the Department of Computer Informatics Engineering of the TEI of Western Greece in Nafpaktos (2018-2019). Since 2019, he is with the ECE Department of the University of Peloponnese in Patras.

His teaching experience includes courses in the area of Digital Audio Processing, Digital Image Processing, Digital Signal Processing, and Biomedical Signal processing in undergraduate as well as post graduate programs. He has supervised more than 12 post graduate students and currently three PhD students working in the area of the brain signal analysis and cancer detection in digital mammography.

He is the Founding Director of the SIGNAL, IMAGE PROCESSING & PATTERN RECOGNITION (SIPPRE) Research Group (hhtp://www.sippre-group.com) at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Peloponnese (2020), in the field of signal and image processing, biomedical signal and image analysis and brain computer interfaces (BCI). He has authored a number of research papers in international scientific journals, book chapters and international conference proceedings in scientific areas of his expertise. He is a member of the Technical Chamber of Greece, IEEE, IEEE Signal Processing Society, IEEE EMBS Society, the European Neural Network Society (ENNS) and the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA). He has served as a mentor at the IEEE EMBS Student Mentoring Program (SMP) (2021 and 2022) as well as the IEEE (ME-UYR) Mentoring Experiences for Underrepresented Young Researchers Program (2022).