Nicolaos Georgiou Alexopoulos (born March 30, 1942) is a Greek electrical engineer, former professor and university dean, and a champion of education and research.
[6] He was a former member of the Scientific Advisory Board for the Centre for Integrated Circuits and Systems at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore from April 2010 to March 2012.
[15] His PhD advisors were Chiao-Min Chu and Piergiorgio Uslenghi; his dissertation was entitled "Electromagnetic Scattering from Certain Radially Inhomogeneous Dielectrics.
Needing a broadband antenna, Aristides designed a spiral, rhombic-shaped wire object that he and Nicolaos mounted on a wooden pole, propped up by rocks, to the roof of the family's home.
Generous donations from industry leaders Henry Samueli (Broadcom Corporation) and Dwight Decker (Conexant) made possible the funding of faculty and graduate fellowships at UCI's engineering school.
[8][9] He also led the creation of the annual Broadcom Foundation University Research Competition for international engineering graduate students.
[38][1] Dr. Alexopoulos is highly cited in computer science and engineering literature and has written hundreds of scholarly articles and publications.
[17]: 17 [46] In 2016, Broadcom Foundation sought to re-envision the STEM university programs it sponsors by focusing on the development of collaborative, student-driven workshops.
[49] Alexopoulos and the workshop professors "insisted on a cross-disciplinary group of individuals because it's a global society that can tap the wonders of advanced communications; this is the academic model of the future.
The inaugural workshop was hosted by Tel Aviv University in 2017, Imperial College London in 2018, and Indian Institute of Science (Bengaluru), in 2019.
Twenty-two graduate students with diverse backgrounds and academic disciplines "engaged in team-driven innovation activities and discussions to tackle how society might expand the means and methods to develop SMART cities and enhance the quality and performance of urban services in energy, transportation, health and public utilities.
In addition to playing a significant role throughout his academic work and engineering career, spirals became a favorite focus of fascination and study in his personal endeavors as well.
In addition to the many technical articles and journal publications he has written on spirals, he has given lectures on spiral shapes and their history to such organizations as IEEE; U.S. National Committee for the International Union of Radio Science (USNC-URSI); University of California, Irvine; and the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.