Athanasios Tsakalidis was born in 1950 in Katerini, Pieria. He obtained his Ph.D. in informatics in 1983 at the Computer Science department of Saarland University, Germany. His thesis is entitled “Some Results for the Dictionary Problem” and was completed under the supervision of Professor Kurt Mehlhorn, director of the Max Planck Institute for Informatics. Before that, he had earned a master’s degree (thesis: “Sorting Presorted Files”, 1980) and an undergraduate degree in informatics (1977) from the same university. The latter was his second undergraduate degree, as he had previously graduated from the Mathematics Department of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece (1973).

In 1989, he returned to Greece to become a professor at the Computer Engineering and Informatics Department (CEID), University of Patras, where he served for 12 years in total as Chairman and currently remains professionally active as Emeritus Professor.