Dr. Nicholas S. Samaras is a Professor at  the Department of Digital Systems at the University of Thessaly. Previously, he had been a Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the Director of the Network Engineering Division at the Technological Educational Institute (TEI) of Thessaly. He has served  as Department Head, in two terms, and as a Director of the MSc Program in Network Computing, offered in collaboration with Staffordshire University, UK, from 2003 to 2012. Over the years he has been involved in numerous National and European research projects. His current research interests include Networked Control Systems, Wireless Sensor Networks and IoT, System Modeling and Automation.   Dr. Samaras received the BS and MS degrees from the City College of the City University of New York, NY, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, all in Electrical Engineering. He has been an adjunct faculty member at the Department of Telecommunications and the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Pittsburgh, from 2000 to 2002, and a visiting professor at the Sydansk Southern Denmark University, the San Jorge University in Zaragoza Spain, and Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, in Wroclaw, Poland.

For over 15 years he had developed, designed, implemented and commissioned various distributed control and automation systems, applied to a variety of processing applications, worldwide. He has authored more than 60 publications in major referee international journals, conferences and/or book chapters. He was a co-recipient of the IEEE Industry Applications Society Prize Paper Award in 1998. He served as Chair of the Paper Reviews Committee of the IEEE Industry Applications Society from 2002 to 2009. He has also served in several Organizing, Steering and/or Program Committees, for various international conferences. Dr. Samaras is an Associate Editor for the MDPI journals of Algorithms, Sensors and the European Scientific Journal.