For yet another year Greeks from all over the world, managed to excel, to abolish the borders and make us proud with their achievements. The ellines.com team chose 12 of them, one for each month of 2015, who caused international sensation with their work and personality.

January – Tony Tiganis

Greek-Australian scientist and researcher Tony Tiganis may hold the key in the fight against obesity. The process conjured by Tiganis relates to leptin, a hormone produced by fat acting to suppress hunger and insulin, produced by the pancreas in response to the levels of glucose in the blood after a meal. Tiganis is a professor and Deputy Head (Research) of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Monash University. He is in charge of the Tiganis Laboratory which is a Cellullar signalling and human desease laboratory. Read more…

February – Alexander Desplat

The Oscars 2015 held a pleasant surprise for the Greek-French Alexander Desplat who won the Oscar for the Best Original Score for his work in «The Grand Budapest Hotel». Read more…

March – Stamatios Krimigis

The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum Trophy for 2015 was awarded to Stamatios “Tom” M. Krimigis for Lifetime Achievement. Stamatios “Tom” Krimigis, who for 45 years has pioneered the exploration of our solar system and beyond while at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, has received the museum’s highest honor. Established in 1985, the award recognizes outstanding achievements in the fields of aerospace science and technology and their history. Read more…

April – Gabriella Papadakis

Gabriella Papadakis with her partner Guillaume Cizeron, are the 2015 World champions. She is a French ice dancer with Greek descent. The succesful duo won also the 2015 European champion, the 2014 Grand Prix Final bronze medalist and 2015 French national champion. Read more…

May – Costa Gavras

Acclaimed Greek filmmaker Costa Gavras was honoured at Cannes Film Festival. He received a standing ovation at the official screening of a restored version of his 1969 “Z” at the Cannes Film Festival. Read more…

June – Paul Alivisatos

Paul Alivisatos, Director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California (UC) Berkeley’s Samsung Distinguished Professor of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, has received the second Tsinghua University Press – Springer Nano Research Award. The award ceremony took place at the 2015 Sino-US Nano Forum, held from June 25-28 in Wuhan, China. Read more…

July – Panos Anastasiadis

A scientific team led by a Greek researcher believe they may have found a way to “turn off cancer” by reverting cancerous cells to healthy tissue. Researchers at the US Mayo Clinic demonstrated a method to turn cancerous breast and bladder cells benign, according to their study published in the Nature Cell Biology. Τhe study’s senior investigator is Dr Panos Anastasiadis, chair of the department of cancer biology at the Mayo Clinic‘s campus in Florida. Read more…

August – Manolis Kellis

A new approach to prevent and even cure obesity may be found, thanks to a study led by researchers at MIT and Harvard Medical School and published today in the New England Journal of Medicine. By analyzing the cellular circuitry underlying the strongest genetic association with obesity, the researchers have unveiled a new pathway that controls human metabolism by prompting our adipocytes, or fat cells, to store fat or burn it away. The senior author of the study is a Greek scientist Manolis Kellis. He is a professor of computer science and a member of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and of the Broad Institute. Read more…

September – Betty Cantrell

Betty Cantrell the winner of the top US beauty pageant is of Greek origin. Along with the impressive Miss America crown for a year she also won a $ 50,000 scholarship. Betty Cantrell turned 21 years on 1st September. She is of Greek and German descent and her real name is Vasiliki, which she took from her grandmother. Her mother is Greek. Read more…

October – Stylianos Antonarakis

A pair of studies by researchers at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, the University of Trento in Italy, and the University of Geneva in Switzerland, point to a promising new anti-retroviral strategy for combating HIV-1. Prof. Stylianos Antonarakis’ research group at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Geneva (UNIGE) showed that the host cell membrane proteins SERINC5 and SERINC3 greatly reduce the virulence of HIV-1 by blocking the ability of the virus to infect new cells. HIV-1 encodes a protein called Nef that counteracts the SERINCs. New drugs that target the HIV-1 protein Nef would permit the SERINC proteins to inactivate the virus. Read more…

November – Andrew Liveris

Andrew N. Liveris is the President, the Chairman and the Chief Executive Officer of “The Dow Chemical Company”. The Dow Chemical Company is a global technology company focused on developing innovative solutions at the intersections of the physical, materials, polymer and biological sciences with 2014 annual sales of more than $58 billion. His company was in the Thomson Reuters Top 100 Global Innovators showcasing the world’s 100 most innovative organizations. Read more…

December – Constantine Dafermos

Constantine M. Dafermos of Brown University will receive the 2016 Norbert Wiener Prize in Applied Mathematics. Presented by the AMS and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), the prize honors Dafermos “for his foundational work in partial differential equations and continuum physics.” Read more…