Short Bio
Dr. Marinos Ioannides is since the 1st of January 2012 the director of the Digital Heritage Research lab at the Cyprus University of Technology in Limassol. The lab has been awarded several EU projects within its ten years’ debut (total budget for CUT: €10.1M). He received his MSc in CS from the University of Stuttgart, Germany where his thesis was undertaken at the HP European Headquarters in safety and security of Multitasking Repository-systems. He continued at the same University for his PhD (Dr.-Eng) where he participated in several EU and national DFG research projects. His pioneering work on the 3D Volumetric Reconstruction of any objects from digitized scattered data during his PhD let him to receive the important IBM Award in 1993 of two (2) Million Deutsche Mark. In 1995 he received for his achievements from the European Commission the prestigious EU KIT award and in 2010 he was awarded from the Spanish Association of Virtual Archaeology the prestigious Tartessos prize for his successes in 3D-documentation in Cultural Heritage. In 2017, Marinos received the unique UNESCO Chair on Digital Cultural Heritage, which is the only Chair in the World in the area of Education, Science and Technology, as well as in 2018 the EU Innovation Award at the Innovators in Cultural Heritage Fair in Brussels. In the same year he received from the European Commission the European Research Area (ERA) Chair award on Digital Cultural Heritage with a €2.5M financial support in order to establish with his team in Cyprus a regional centre of Excellence on Digital Cultural Heritage and run a unique online Master course on digital cultural heritage.
In 2019 the European Commission/Research Executive Agency declared his project Marie Curie Action Project (MSCA ITN-DCH) as one of the best five projects under the category: “Life Changing Innovation projects” in the last decade (2009-2019) in the EU.
Since 2021 he is an honourable Corresponding Member of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI).
In 2022 the European Commission declared the results of the EU VIGIE2020/654 Study on quality in 3D digitisation of tangible objects as exceptional and published them as an official document of the EU. The Study was the result of a highly competitive tender, which was the first to be announced in the area of Cultural Heritage and in the history of the European Commission.