Yannis Ioannidis is currently a Professor at the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications of the University of Athens. In early 2011 he also became the President and General Director of the ATHENA Research and Innovation Center; in addition, since April 2011, he serves as the Acting Director of the Institute of Language and Speech Processing of ATHENA.

He received his Diploma in Electrical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens in 1982, his MSc in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University in 1983, and his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of California-Berkeley in 1986. Immediately after that he joined the faculty of the Computer Sciences Department of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he became a Professor before finally leaving in 1999. His research interests include database and information systems, personalization and social networks, data infrastructures and digital libraries & repositories, scientific systems and workflows, eHealth systems, and human-computer interaction, topics on which he has published over one hundred articles in leading journals and conferences. He also holds three patents.

Yannis is an ACM and IEEE Fellow (2004 and 2010, respectively) and a recipient of the VLDB "10-Year Best Paper Award" (2003), the "Presidential Young Investigator Award" - PYI (1991), and of several awards for teaching excellence, including the nation-wide "Xanthopoulos-Pneumatikos Award for Outstanding Academic Teaching" in Greece (2006) and the "Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching" at the University of Wisconsin (1996). He has also been a keynote or invited speaker in several conferences (NLDB'08, ICDE'07, ADBIS'06, CIKM'05, ICDT'03, WAIM'01, SSDBM'00, PDP'00, ECDL'98).

Yannis has been a (co-)principal investigator in over thirty research projects funded by various government agencies (USA, Europe, Greece) or private industry. He is currently an Associate Editor of Information Systems and Journal of Digital Libraries and has been a member of the program committees of over sixty conferences, six times as (co-)chair (ICDE'09, ADBIS'07, EDBT'06, HDMS'03, VLDB'02, VDB'98, and SSDBM'97).

Yannis currently serves as the ACM SIGMOD Chair (July 2009-June 2013), following a 4-year term as Vice-Chair, and is or has been a member of several other executive bodies of professional organizations (VLDB Endowment, IEEE TCDE Executive Committee, EDBT Endowment) and Scientific Advisory Boards (Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Greek National Science & Technology Council, Information Technology advisor to the Greek Minister of Health).