Demosthenes Kazanas is an astrophysicist researcher working at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. In 1980s, he was one of the first people to mention the idea of cosmological inflation, a theory of the exponential expansion of space in the early universe. Recently, he was part of a research that discovered the magnetic origin of black hole winds across the mass scale.

Demosthenes Kazanas was born in 1950 in Kavala, Greece. He completed his B.Sc. at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 1973 and then his M.S. and his Ph.D.at the University of Chicago in 1975 and 1978 respectively.

He started working as a teaching assistant, while being a graduate student, in 1973 at the University of Chicago, a position he kept until December 1975.He was also a visiting scholar at the University of Adelaide for the period March 1987 to April 1987, at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in January 1995 and at the University of Athens from July 1996 till August 1996.

In 1980, he published the “Dynamics of the Universe and Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking”. It was a very early idea of how the universe expanded and after him and Alan Guth, the word inflation was proposed to explain the nonexistence of magnetic monopoles.

For the period 1980-1982, he worked as a research associate at the National Academy of Science – National Research Council (NAS/NRC) and from 1982 until 1988, he worked as a research associate at the University of Maryland.

From then on, Demosthenes Kazanas is working at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and is considered as one of the most important researchers at NASA. His research areas are High Energy Astrophysics (The physics of compact accreting sources), the Gravitational Collapse (effects of neutrinos in gravitational collapse) and Alternative Gravitational Theories (Conformal gravity and astrophysical applications in galactic rotation curves).

Recently, the Greek astrophysicist and Ioannis Kontopoulos were the two Greeks among a research team that has discovered the magnetic origin of black hole winds across the mass scale. The results of the research were published at the astronomy journal “Nature Astronomy”.

Demosthenes Kazanas has more than 150 publications on major scientific journals, has won many scholarships and grants and has been invited as an honored guest and speaker in many lectures.