Dr. Georgios Ellinas holds a B.S. (Academic Honors with Distinction 1991), M.Sc. (1993), M.Phil. (1995), and a Ph.D. (1998) in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University. Dr. Ellinas is currently an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Cyprus. Prior to joining the University of Cyprus Dr. Ellinas was an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at City College of the City University of New York (2002-2005). Before joining the academia, Dr. Ellinas was a Senior Network Architect at Tellium Inc (2000-2002). In this role, he worked on lightpath provisioning and fault restoration algorithms in optical mesh networks, and the architecture design of the MEMS-based all-optical switch. Dr. Ellinas also served as a Senior Research Scientist in Telcordia Technologies' (formerly Bellcore) Optical Networking Research Group, where he performed research for the DARPA-funded Optical Networks Technology Consortium (ONTC), Multiwavelength Optical Networking (MONET) and Next Generation Internet (NGI) projects from 1993 to 2000. Dr. Ellinas also served as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University and the University of Maryland Baltimore County, teaching courses on multiwavelength optical networking in 1999 and 2000, respectively. He was awarded a Fulbright fellowship, from 1987 to 1991, for undergraduate studies at Columbia University, where he received the Armstrong Memorial and the William L. Everitt awards (1991) at the Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University. Dr. Ellinas also received the Eliahu I. Jury award (1998) for the most outstanding Ph.D. dissertation in the Department of Electrical Engineering, the Jacob Millman graduate teaching assistant award (1993) and a fellowship from Bell Communications Research (1996). He has co-authored two books on optical networks (J. Wiley 2007, Cambridge University Press 2008), he is the co-editor of another book on optical networks (Springer 2011), he has authored and co-authored 11 book chapters and more than 175 journal and conference papers, and he is the holder of 30 patents on optical networking. He was also awarded a best project/paper award at the 1996 OPNET competition for a project using OPNET as the simulator platform, a best poster award at ONDM'2013, and best paper awards at CRITIS'2013 and ICT-DM'2015. He is a Senior Member of IEEE, and a Member of OSA, ACM, and the Marie Curie Fellows Association.

Optical architectures, routing and wavelength assignment algorithms (physical-logical layer integration, point-to-point, multicast, and groupcast), fault protection/restoration techniques in arbitrary mesh optical networks, security in optical networks, traffic grooming, complex networks, optical access networks (EPONs, WDM-PONs, and converged optical-wireless), critical infrastructure systems.