Costas Synolakis - Biography#

Costas Synolakis was born in Greece in 1956 and he attended Athens College. He obtained all his degrees (BSc., MSc., and PhD) from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He became a professor at the University of Southern California ( USC) in 1985, and a professor at the Technical University of Crete( Greece) in 2004.

Synolakis has over 45,000 individual references in Google, (Search Synolakis tsunami) , 11500 citations in Google Scholar, 115 peer reviewed papers and over 5000 ISI citations with ISI h—index 43, GS h–index 57. He has edited five books, he has over 220 conference presentations, and he has helped produce ten DISCOVERY, seven BBC, four National Geographic, four History Channel, one ZDF documentaries primarily on tsunamis. He is a both great scientist/Engineer and a great communicator of science and engineering issues with over 250 US and international TV appearances in Greek, US, Canadian, Turkish, Japanese, Vanuatu, PNG and Cypriot TV prime time interviews. He has over thirty interviews with Der Spiegel, New Zurcher Zeitung, Le Monde, and El Pais, the New York Times, Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and the Economist, and over 40 in the Los Angeles Times, Seattle Post, and San Francisco Examiner, and more than 100 interviews in Greek newspapers. He has received over 6 million Euros in individual US and EU grants (not including those with his name while President of "Hellenic Centre for Marine Research" ( HCMR)). He has given over 100 invited seminars and he has led or co–organized 23 international tsunami post-event surveys. The site www.usc.edu/dept/tsunamis of the Tsunami Research Center that he founded has over 35 million hits since its inception in 1998.

Synolakis has mentored over 50 PhD and MSc students, of which about 1/3 have been women, and one PhD student with substantial learning disabilities.

In 2016, Synolakis was elected to the 46–member Academy of Athens, which is the Greek National Academy for letters, arts, law, medicine, engineering and the sciences. In 2018, he was elected President of its division of Natural Sciences.

Synolakis is best known for his ground-breaking theories of wave physics and insights in the complexities of major tsunamis in the world.