Nikolaos Stefanou, born 1958 at Volos, completed his undergraduate studies in Physics at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in 1980. He received an MSc degree in Condensed Matter Physics in 1981, a PhD degree in Physics in 1984, and a "Doctorat d' État" in Physical Sciences in 1986 from the University of Strasbourg. Then, he worked at the Research Center of Jülich as a post-doctoral fellow, and joined the Department of Physics of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens as an Assistant Professor in 1989. He was tenured as an Associate Professor in 1999 and became Full Professor in 2010. He was director of the Section of Condensed Matter Physics from 2011 till 2016, director of the Laboratory of Mechanical Engineering and Design from 2016 till 2019 and chairman of the Department of Physics from 2020 till 2022. He served as a member of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) evaluation board for the Priority Program "Photonic Crystals" (2001, 2003, 2005) and as a member of the European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant peer review panel in the field of Condensed Matter Physics (2013, 2015, 2017, 2019). He is member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Modern Physics B and of Modern Physics Letters B. His research interests include electronic structure and properties of matter, optical and elastic properties of nanostructures, photonic and phononic crystals. He has published 165 peer-reviewed scientific papers that have been cited about 5000 times by other researchers.