Edward Karavakis

Edward Karavakis (Εδουάρδος Καραβάκης; born October 29, 1983) is a Greek computer scientist working as a Senior Applications Engineer at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) stationed at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland.

Early life and education
Karavakis completed his bachelor's degree in Computer Science in 2005 from the University of East London and his master's degree in Data Communication Systems in 2006 from Brunel University. He was then awarded a three years of funding for his PhD research from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) in UK. In 2008, Karavakis started collaborating with the IT department of CERN for his doctoral research. He completed his doctorate degree in 2010 from Brunel University.

Career
Upon completing his PhD, Karavakis was hired as a post-doctoral researcher in the IT department of CERN in 2010 and then hired as a CERN staff in 2013. In May 2022, Edward joined Brookhaven National Laboratory. Based at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, he is a core member of the PanDA (Production and Distributed Analysis) Workload Management System project team. PanDA is a high-performance, scalable system designed to manage and distribute computational tasks across large-scale, distributed computing environments. This project plays an important role in supporting the ATLAS experiment at CERN, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory  in Chile, and sPHENIX at BNL.

Before joining Brookhaven National Laboratory, Karavakis was the project leader of the File Transfer Service (FTS), the grid data transfer service used at the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG). The WLCG project is a global computing infrastructure of more than 180 data centres in 42 countries scattered around the world that produce a massive distributed computing infrastructure with about 1,000,000 CPU cores, providing more than 10,000 physicists around the world with near real-time access to the LHC data, and the power to process it. Other projects that Karavakis was involved with include the Experiment Dashboard Monitoring System for the WLCG and the MONIT   monitoring project at CERN.

Edward Karavakis has been a supporter of the CERN & Society Foundation since 2019. His commitment to the charitable branch of CERN is exemplified by his active involvement in promoting its mission. In an internal campaign aimed at raising awareness among CERN personnel, Edward was invited to share his insights about the Foundation through a video interview. This initiative sought to highlight the Foundation's pivotal role in extending the reach and impact of CERN's activities beyond its core research, benefiting the wider public.