Dr Ioannis Ganopoulos was born in Drama, Greece, in 1982. He holds a PhD in Genetics and Plant Breeding from the School of Agriculture of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH) (October 2013). Since 2022, he has served as Chair of the Scientific Council of the Institute (ESI).

His research interests cover almost all areas of Genetics and Genomic Technology and their applications, Genetic and Molecular Breeding, the assessment of Biodiversity and Genetic Resources, Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering, as well as food production and control, particularly through the use of molecular diagnostic methods. Dr Ganopoulos received a Heraclitus doctoral fellowship from the European Social Fund and the National Funds during the period 2010-2013. He developed an identity-verification tool based on HRM analysis for several PDO/PGI products, such as Tragana Edessis cherries and Santorini fava. The research team involved in this achievement received a distinction from the President of the Hellenic Republic in 2013 and an award from the Minister of Rural Development and Food in 2013. In 2017, he was appointed Researcher at ELGO-DIMITRA and, within a short period of seven (7) years, successfully coordinated eight (8) research projects as Principal Investigator and ten (10) funded projects as Work Package Leader. He has also participated in fourteen (14) research projects as a collaborator. He established the Genomics Laboratory of the Institute of Plant Breeding and Genetic Resources of ELGO-DIMITRA through the POGROM research project (Region of Central Macedonia - European Regional Development Fund). He coordinated (2018-2021) Sub-project 1 of the Flagship Action “Olive Roads” and, through the Network, promoted the collaboration of the country’s human resources and infrastructures for the identification, traceability and certification of olive varieties and for the improvement of table olive and olive oil production processes using genomic and advanced diagnostic technologies. In this way, unique national products such as olives and olive oil acquire added value and a strategic competitive advantage that will contribute to strengthening extroversion. The new research network “Olive Roads” was established on the initiative of the General Secretariat for Research and Innovation of the Ministry of Development, in cooperation with the Ministry of Rural Development and Food.

He has a strong track record of 150 peer-reviewed scientific articles in SCI journals and an h-index of 44 (5,521 citations in Google Scholar), in 50 of which he is first author and/or corresponding author. More than 10 of these articles have been published in leading journals in the fields of omics and food sciences, such as The Plant Journal, Food Chemistry, iScience, Food Control, GigaScience, Horticulture Research and Plant Physiology. He has been invited to contribute chapters to seven (7) books on omics technologies and table olives as functional foods (chapter in Kiritsakis, A. and Shahidi, F. eds., 2017. Olives and Olive Oil as Functional Foods: Bioactivity, Chemistry and Processing. John Wiley & Sons). He serves as editor for the journals Plants, International Journal of Molecular Sciences, Biochemical Genetics, PeerJ and Frontiers in Horticulture.

All the above clearly demonstrates his coordination, supervisory and collaborative skills. Dr Ganopoulos has shown strong initiative from the early stages of his career and throughout its course, building and maintaining long-term multidisciplinary collaborations and aiming at scientific innovation. He has been highly productive, consolidating over the years his position in the field of molecular plant breeding.

 30/04/2024 - 31/12/2025. “Flagship action for sustainable agri-food systems: applied research, infrastructure development and services for the sustainability of the sector” (SUS.AGRI.FOOD), within the Funding Framework of the National Development Programme (NDP) 2021-2025.

Boutsika, A., Michailidis, M., Ganopoulou, M., Dalakouras, A., Skodra, C., Xanthopoulou, A.,Ganopoulos, I. (2023). A wide foodomics approach coupled with metagenomics elucidates the environmental signature of potatoes. Iscience, 26(1).

 Bazakos, C., Alexiou, K. G., Ramos‐Onsins, S., Koubouris, G., Tourvas, N., Xanthopoulou, A.Ganopoulos, I. (2023). Whole genome scanning of a Mediterranean basin hotspot collection provide new insights into olive tree biodiversity and biology. The Plant Journal.

 Xanthopoulou, A., Manioudaki, M., Bazakos, C., Kissoudis, C., Farsakoglou, A. M.,Karagiannis, E.,Ganopoulos, I. (2020). Whole genome re-sequencing of sweet cherry (Prunus avium L.) yields insights into genomic diversity of a fruit species. Horticulture Research, 7(1), 1-14.

 Xanthopoulou, A., Montero-Pau, J., Mellidou, I., Kissoudis, C., Blanca, J., Picó, B., Ganopoulos, I. (2019). Whole-genome resequencing of Cucurbita pepo morphotypes to discover genomic variants associated with morphology and horticulturally valuable traits. Horticulture research, 6(1), 1-17.

 Bazakos, C., Michailidis, M., Tourvas, N., Alexiou, K. G., Mellidou, I., Polychroniadou, C Ganopoulos, I. (2024). Genetic mosaic of the Mediterranean fig: comprehensive genomic insights from a gene bank collection. Physiologia Plantarum, 176(4), e14482.