Professor Georgios Exadaktylos has been born on 20th of December 1961. He has obtained his diploma of Mining & Metallurgical Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens in 1985. Next, in 1988 he has obtained a Master of Science Diploma in Mineral Resources Engineering from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (VPI&SU), USA. In the next year 1989, he has acquired the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Mining Engineering and Rock Mechanics at the National Technical University of Athens. Then for a period of three years he has worked as mining engineer in marble quarries in Greece (Dionysos-Pendelikon, Naxos, Tinos, Drama) and he has contributed to the design of the underground exploitation of marble for the first time in the Greek Marble sector, that successfully continues until today. In 2010 he has also contributed to the underground exploitation design for the dolomitic marble quarry at Volakas, Drama and other decorative stone deposits in Greece and abroad (both surface and underground design and planning). On 1993 he was appointed faculty member (Assistant Professor) at the Mineral Resources Engineering Department of the Technical University of Crete. He has done consulting for a number of mineral extraction companies (bauxite, mixed sulphides, gold, marble, limestone etc) and Geotechnical companies. Currently he is Professor of Rock Mechanics & Mining Engineering at the Technical University of Crete where he is also the Director of the Mining Engineering Design Laboratory since 1999 and Director of the Rock Mechanics Laboratory since 2014. He is a member of more than ten professional bodies and member of the Editorial Board of four scientific journals. His expertise refers to Surface and Underground Mining Engineering, Tunnelling, Rock Mechanics, Geotechnical Engineering, Mineral resources exploration and evaluation, Geostatistics, Recovery of Energy Resources, Mechanics/Micromechanics, Fracture Mechanics, Damage Mechanics, Computational Mechanics, and Mines Rehabilitation/Environmental Protection. He has published more than one hundred (100) papers in Greek & International scientific Journals, refereed national and international conferences, and book chapters. He is also the editor together with I. Vardoulakis of a book entitled Bifurcation, Instabilities and Degradation in Geomechanics, Springer. Apart from conducting applied research in a number of national projects funded by the private quarrying and mining sectors, he was also scientific and administrative responsible in ten competitive collaborative RTD European Projects of Framework Programmes (FP’s) 4th to 7th. He has also been Project Coordinator in two European Commission collaborative RTD Projects in the areas of Rock & Fracture Mechanics and Rock Physics related to Protection of Cultural Heritage, and Work-Package leader referring to tunneling design and geotechnical characterization in the largest European Commission IP-FP6 Project in Tunneling ever (http://www.ifb.tugraz.at/tunconstruct/ ). In the year 2010 he has been also nominated as an Expert of INSPIRE EC-Directive in the Technical Committee of “Natural Risk Zones” http://inspire.ec.europa.eu/index.cfm/pageid/2/list/30 . In the period 2011-2012 he has been appointed by European Commission as an Expert Reviewer of proposals referring to large scale CO2 storage.
(Photo: G. Exadaktylos (left) discussing with G. Anagnostou of ETH (right) during a coffee-break of EURO:TUN 2009 Conference in Bochum (Germany) on 9-11th of September 2009)