I got my physics degree from the University of Thessaloniki , Greece, in 1989, having taken most of the Department's Astronomy elective courses and having done my diploma work with John Seiradakis on site testing for an educational observatory.

I then moved to the Astronomy Department of Boston University where I got my Master's in 1991. I interrupted for two years to serve the Greek Army , and in the fall of 1993 I returned to Boston University where I wrote my PhD thesis (January 1999) on Blazar models under the supervision of Alan Marscher .

My first postdoc was in the Max Planck Institut fuer Kernphysik in Heidelberg, Germany, where I worked with John Kirk . In 2002 I moved to the DC area to work with Demosthenes Kazanas in NASA/ Goddard as an National Research Council fellow.