Konstantinos (Costas) Vellidis, born in 1965 in Athens, completed his undergraduate studies in Physics at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA) in 1988. He received a MSc degree in Nuclear Physics in 1989 from the University Paris XI at Orsay, France, a PhD degree in Nuclear Physics from NKUA in 2001, and the Peter Demos award for the best PhD thesis conducted at the W. H. Bates Electron Accelerator Laboratory of MIT, where he worked for his PhD during 1993-1998.