Athanasios Tsakalidis

Athanasios K. Tsakalidis (; born 1950) is a Greek computer scientist, a professor at the Graphics, Multimedia and GIS Laboratory, Computer Engineering and Informatics Department (CEID), University of Patras, Greece.
Early life and education
Athanasios Tsakalidis was born in 1950 in Katerini, Pieria, northern Greece, and studied mathematics at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. In 1973 he embarked on a journey around Europe which led him to Saarbrücken, Germany, where he was introduced by prof. Günter Hotz to the novel (at the time) field of computer science that was then being coined informatics. After 28 months of national service, he was enrolled in 1976 to the Computer Science department of Saarland University becoming the oldest undergraduate student (26 years old freshman) to be advised by the youngest professor at the time (27 years old), Kurt Mehlhorn.
Tsakalidis obtained his Ph.D. degree in informatics in 1983 at the Computer Science department of Saarland University, Germany. His thesis is entitled "Some Results for the Dictionary Problem" and was completed under the supervision Professor Kurt Mehlhorn, director of the Max Planck Institute for Informatics. Prior to that he had earned a master's degree (thesis: "Sorting Presorted Files", 1980) and an undergraduate degree in informatics (1977) by the same university. In fact, the latter was his second undergraduate degree, as he had previously graduated from the Mathematics Department of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece (1973).
Since 1983, he participated in research for the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the German community of research) and professional teaching at the University of Saarland related to Data Structures, Graph Algorithms, Computational Geometry and programming, until 1989, when he returned to Greece to become an associate professor (and later in 1992 a full professor) at the Computer Engineering and Informatics Department (CEID), University of Patras, where he remains professionally active until today. He was also a visiting professor at King's College London (2003-2006).
Research
His research interests include: Data Structures, Graph Algorithms, Computational Geometry, GIS, Medical Informatics, Expert Systems, Databases, Multimedia, Information Retrieval, and Bioinformatics.
His pioneering results on the list manipulation and localized search problems in the 1980s led to the foundation of the ubiquitous persistence theory on data structures, developed by Robert E. Tarjan.
Other significant results on the design and analysis of data structures were contributed on the problems of interpolation search, negative cycle and nearest common ancestor, the latter being referenced as "Tsakalidis' Algorithm" in the optimal results of Mikkel Thorup.

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