Our People

According to the current organizational chart, the Chairwoman and founder of the Academy is Professor of Health Promotion, Prevention and Epidemiology, Dr. Christina Darviri .

Dr. Darviri Christina is among the high-prestige list «World’s Top 2% Scientists», that is, among the most distinguished scientists of the world in the field of health promotion and stress science. Indicative of the global recognition she has received is that she is the only Greek woman,and the 197th worldwide among 11,649 scientists  ranked in the top 2% of the world's top scientists for 2021-2022 in her field of knowledge/Health Science/Health Promotion/Stress Science/stress management. The selection was made among 9 million scientists worldwide who were evaluated in 22 fields and 176 subfields of all sciences. This is based on a list published by the scientific publishing house Elsevier in collaboration with Stanford University in the USA and includes the top scientists for the year 2021. In 2023, she was ranked even higher, reaching the 127th place worldwide and among 13,830 authors who were selected according to strict criteria (among approximately 9 million scientists), using the same process as in 2021-2022.

Her academic and research career includes extensive academic work as well as collaborations with Universities in Greece and internationally, as she has also been trained in internationally recognized universities, such as the Universities of Berkeley and San Francisco, while she was a Visiting Professor and Associate Researcher at the National Institutes of Health, USA in Washington. In 2008, she founded, in collaboration with Professor Chrousos Georgios, the Postgraduate Studies Program "Science of stress and health promotion" at the Medical School of the University of Athens, which has operated uninterruptedly since then, where she continues to be a professor, while she has been the scientific director of numerous research programs. Her writing includes more than 255 publications in international peer-reviewed scientific journals, books and monographs, while she has supervised a large number of doctoral theses and postgraduate theses, enthusiastically supporting young scientists, doctors and health professionals. Specifically, she has performed over 100 interventions with the Pythagorean self-awareness technique on different groups of healthy, apparently healthy and sick people, having vast experience in interpreting the results of the method and its benefits to humans, since she is very familiar with qualitative and quantitative research on stress and health promotion.

The position of Vice chairman is held by the internationally recognized Professor Emeritus of Pediatrics and Endocrinology at the Medical School of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, George Chrousos George Chrousos.

Since 2010 Mr. Chrousos has held the UNESCO Chair in Adolescent Health and Medicine and is also Director of the University Research Institute on Maternal and Child Health and Precision Medicine at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He has received worldwide recognition for being one of the most highly cited scientists in the world (ISI highly cited), the only Greek physician-scientist included in the ISI highly cited list in Clinical Medicine, which includes the 200 most cited physician-scientists in the worldMr. Chrousos is internationally recognized for his research into the molecular system of glucocorticoid signal transduction in the cell, adrenal axis diseases and the physiological and molecular mechanisms of stress. He has made significant contributions to the biomedical literature and authored over 1,100 scientific publications. According to the Google Scholar citation counter, he is the 37th most recognized scientist in the world, a compelling testimony to the importance and influence of his research. Over the years he has received countless awards and honors, most recentlythe Transatlantic Alliance Award for 2023 from the American Endocrine Society and the European Society of Endocrinology (ESE), an award given to international leaders in science who have made major contributions to endocrinology research on both sides of the Atlantic,i.e. in Europe and the USA.