In 1976, he received a diploma in electrical engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, with a thesis supervised by Emmanuel Protonotarios.

His thesis Algorithms for a scheduling application of the Asymmetric Traveling Salesman Problem was supervised by Ron Rivest and Michael Athans, while Christos Papadimitriou (then professor at Harvard) was also involved.

[12] [13] While at Brown, he supervised seven Ph.D. theses there (Smolka 1985, Revesz 1991, Shvartsman 1992, Mitchell 1993, Hillebrand 1994, Ramaswamy 1995, and Goldin 1997) and one at MIT (Cosmadakis 1985).

After donations from Kanellakis's parents, three graduate fellowships and a prize have been established in his memory at the three institutions where he studied and worked: Brown, MIT, and NTUA.

In 1996, the Computer Science Department at Brown declared its 17th Industrial Partners Program symposium a celebration of Kanellakis's research career, inviting lectures by some of his co-authors.

[63] Several meetings scheduled for 1996 and 1997, in some of which Kanellakis had been expected to participate in various roles, modified their programs to honor his memory and/or dedicated their proceedings to it.

[75][76] Past lectures were given by Arvind,[77][78] Cynthia Dwork,[79] Anna Karlin,[80][81] Richard Karp,[49][82][83] Jon Kleinberg,[84] Nancy Lynch (and Alex Shvartsman),[85] John Mitchell,[86][87] Eugene Myers,[88] Christos Papadimitriou,[89][90] Michael Rabin,[91] Daniel Spielman,[92] Moshe Vardi,[93][94] Mihalis Yannakakis,[76][95] and Andrew Yao.

[23][113][114] The sculpture Horizon by Costas Varotsos, commissioned by Kanellakis's parents in their son's and his family's memory, was installed near Liya, Corinthia in Greece, on family-owned land which has been donated to SOS Children's Villages.