Welcome to my personal academic web page at NKUA
"I always believed that the strategic cooperation among phenomenally different sciences, can lead to dramatically more productive approaches in contemporary scientific challenges."
-- Efthymios P. Pournaras
Qualifications Summary
Education
Efthymios P. Pournaras graduated from Yiagtzion-Delmouzion High School (Lykeion) of Amfissa. He holds a BSc (Diploma) of Physics with an expertise on Nuclear & Particles' Physics from the Department of the same name and also a MSc Diploma in Bioinformatics from the Department of Biology/Sector of Cell Biology & Biophysics both acquired in National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA). Now, he is studying Applied Risk Management at MSc level in the Department of Economics of the same university. He has a Proficiency in English Language as a foreign learner, as well as a higher Business English Certificate and an International Certificate in Financial English from University of Cambridge English Language Assessment.
He started with GW-Basic and Quick Basic, Visual Basic, C/C++, Turbo C, Perl, JAVA and moved on other contemporary computer programming languages such as Objective-C/C# for macOS (former OS X) and iOS devices. He is also developing statistical analysis code in SAS package for finance and banking projects. Furthermore, he is a fan of Wolfram MATHEMATICA and Mathworks MatLab for more technical programming and advanced research activities.
He joined the Institute of Accelerating Systems & Applications (IASA) in 2002, in order to cooperate in the project of Magnetic Field Mapping. He designed and developed the required hardware and software from the ground up.
He has also been a scientific collaborator of the interactive exhibition of Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Mathematics, Computer Science and Robotics Technology team in Eugenides Foundation.
He has won many prizes like the Greek Ministry of Defense & Department of Weather Forecasting prize, the Greek Computer Society award and the Petros Markidis Scholarship for 10 years.
His current professional interests are including, but not limited to, Credit Risk Models' Validation and Model Risk Management (MRM) for Application & Behavioral Scoring models, Pillar II/A-IRB models, IFRS9 and ECL provisioning models, Early Warning models and any other model related with banking activities.
Work Experience
Efthymios P. Pournaras is also an Elected Member of the Board of Directors of SEPETE Scientific Association of NBG Employees since 2015:
D' term: 2022-2024 - Junior Vice President
C' term: 2019-2022 - Junior Vice President
B' term: 2017-2019 - Curator PR
A' term: 2015-2017 - Member
Bublications & Conferences
- Konstantinos Papalamprou and Efthymios P. Pournaras, “Optimizing collateral allocation: A comparative study”, Proceedings of 8th International Symposium and 30th National Conference on Operational Research, 16-18 May 2019, Patrai, Greece.
- Papalamprou, K., Pournaras, E.P., Tychalaki, S. (2019). A Mathematical Programming Approach for the Optimal Collateral Allocation Problem. In: Fortz, B., Labbé, M. (eds) Operations Research Proceedings 2018. Operations Research Proceedings. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18500-8_27
- Efthymios P. Pournaras, Vassiliki A. Iconomidou, Nikolaos Panousis and Stavros J. Hamodrakas, “Calculation of the Mean Packing Density for each of the 20 common amino acid residues on a 30% non-redundant set of transmembrane proteins”, Proceedings of HSCB 4th Conference, 18-20 Dec 2009, NHRF, Athens. Also, at: https://pergamos.lib.uoa.gr/uoa/dl/object/1320561
- E. P. Pournaras, A. Karabarbounis, C. N. Papanicolas, and E. Stiliaris, “The IASA Magnetic Field Mapping (MFM) Project”, in Proc. EPAC'06, Edinburgh, UK, Jun. 2006, paper WEPLS068.
Risk Management & Banking
Coming soon...
Bioinformatics
As an ex-member of the Biophysics & Bioinformatics Laboratory of Professor S.J. Hamodrakas in the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA) and in order to partially fulfill the requirements for the completion of his MSc thesis in Department of Biology, he focused on the calculation of “Packing Parameters” of amino acetic residues in trans-membrane proteins.
A previous work - on the same topic - but focusing on globular water-soluble proteins had already been used in the past for the prediction of amyloidogenic prone regions on protein chains (regions probably responsible for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Prion disease etc.). The results of that work were found to be satisfactory (compared with experimentally retrieved data). Thus, the Bioinformatics Lab's team had a strong motivation to determine a path for the application of the parameters resulting from trans-membrane proteins in new and innovative prediction algorithms. The possibility of identifying regions with special individual properties on trans-membrane proteins via the application of a quick algorithm was regarded an intriguing challenge.
For the reduction of the effort demanded by the manual processes and the minimization of relevant calculations’ time, several utilities and applications were developed. The “tailor made” software was mostly Windows(R) based. Although, parts written in C programming language constituted cross-platform tools.
The applications were designed in such a way, that whenever new 3D protein data are available in Protein Data Bank of Transmembrane Proteins (PDBTM), the update of the packing parameters’ set is just a matter of a few clicks and minutes.
Two screenshots of the newly developed “amyl_3D” software are provided nearby. The application has the ability to reconstruct 3D protein models, which have been pre-processed by “amylG”. The marked regions have higher packing density, which is responsible for several protein characteristics. In the second beta barrel type trans-membrane protein, the beta strands have obviously higher density compared to loops outside the lipid membrane.
Is this a way to identify the amino acetic chains, which are subsumed in the membranes?
amyLOID - amylG - amyl3D:
amyLOID stand-alone Windows application provided in an *.MSI format and amylG "command-line" application both for DOS & Windows platforms were two programs written in C++ for the identification of amyloidogenic prone regions on protein chains. The aforementioned duet was accompanied by the amyl3D Windows graphics application. The latter was able to reconstruct the 3D structure of a protein and mark the amyloidogenic regions on the 3D model! The researcher could overlay the output data of amylG and amylPRED. He/She could also use red-green glasses for a 3D-stereo effect!
Physics
In order to partially fulfill the requirements of his BSc diploma in the NKUA Department of Physics with a specialization in Nuclear & Particles' Physics, he joined the Institute of Accelerating Systems and Applications (IASA) research group as developer of the IASA Automated Magnetic Field Mapping Device, under the supervision of Assistant Professor Stathis Stiliaris. More information is provided upon clicking on the following link:
RACETRACK Magnetic Field Analyzer & particles motion emulator:
The RACETRACK Version 1.0.1 is an integrated software, which is used by the IASA-magnetLAB group to analyze magnetic field data that have been retrieved by the Magnetron I (Automated Magnetic Field Mapping Device). It also analyzes artificial data in the format of 2D matrix ASCII type files.
The software produces fully controllable section plots, 2D contour plots and 3D plots. The researcher can even use his/her game-pad/joystick to navigate in the magnetic field in 3D space and identify possible problematic regions (fringing field effects). The files loaded by RACETRACK are conforming with the *.MFM protocol (kindly check magnetLAB’s web site to download specifications).
Furthermore, it calculates electrons’ rigidities and bending radiuses.
Emulation:
The educational competitive advantage of RACETRACK is the ability to emulate the motion of a charged particle in the magnetic field which is scanned, loaded and reconstructed in an adequately automated way. The user maintains full control over particle’s mass, charge and initial parameters of position and velocity (inputs for the relative differential equations). The software utilizes Lagrangian Mechanics and the orbit is calculated and designed in the hit of a button. Thus, all available magnetic field data are fully explorable no matter if they originate from real mapping activity or comprise the result of a theoretical modeling approach (artificial data).
AIRES Air Shower Simulation:
The AIRES application has been created in “Departamento de Fisica, Universidad Nacional de La Plata in Argentina” by S. J. Sciutto. For more information visit the official web page at: http://www2.fisica.unlp.edu.ar/auger/aires/eg_Aires.html
It comprises of a set of programs and subroutines, which simulate particles' showers produced after the incidence of high energy cosmic rays on the Earth’s atmosphere and manage all the related output data. AIRES is currently being used by various universities and institutions worldwide. The Department of Physics of National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA) is among the institutions utilizing the application's advanced capabilities.
In the following PDF file you can find information for the installation of AIRES in a PC with Windows(R) operating system:
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