Costas Synolakis studied at Caltech and is a professor at the TUC-Crete and the University of Southern California. He headed the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research and has explored over twenty natural disasters around the world through on site post-events missions.

His main academic interests focus on Tsunami research, including inundation field surveys, numerical and analytical modeling and hazard assessment, mitigation and planning. He had also made some great research on wave engineering, including breaking waves and wave run up and other fields as hydrodynamic pressures on dams, two-phase flow etc.

He has been Chair at UNESCO’s IOC Review Board on the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, at 2005 and until 2013 he was the President of the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research (H.C.M.R.).