Kanaris Tsinganos

Kanaris C. Tsinganos (; born July 29, 1951) is a Greek theoretical astrophysicist and Professor Emeritus of Astrophysics at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He works in plasma astrophysics, particularly magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) flows, solar and stellar winds, and cosmic jets.

He received his PhD from the University of Chicago under Eugene N. Parker, and served as director of the National Observatory of Athens (2011–2016) and president of the Hellenic Astronomical Society (2006–2010).

Early life and career Tsinganos was born in Filiatra, Messenia, Greece, and earned a BA in physics from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 1974. He moved to the University of Chicago for graduate study, earning an MS (1976) and a PhD (1980) in Physics; his dissertation on MHD equilibrium was supervised by Eugene Parker.

He held research and teaching posts at Chicago's Enrico Fermi Institute and at Harvard University (1980–1984), then joined the newly founded Department of Physics at the University of Crete in 1984, rising to full professor in 1997 while also affiliated with the Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas (1989–2001). and the Blandford–Payne (1982) disk-wind model. From the 1990s, with collaborators he developed a series of "nonradial and nonpolytropic astrophysical outflows" MHD models applied to solar and stellar winds and to jets from young stellar objects and active galactic nuclei.

Other interests include twisted magnetic fields in the Sun, the lower solar atmosphere near coronal holes, and linking small-scale solar wind properties to coronal source regions using joint Parker Solar Probe and Solar Orbiter observations. He served as Greek principal investigator for the Coronagraph Electronics and Control board of the ASPIICS coronagraph aboard ESA's Proba-3 mission, launched December 2024, and is a co-author on its first science papers.

National Observatory of Athens As Director of the National Observatory of Athens, Tsinganos oversaw ESA-funded projects including the Hubble Catalogue of Variables and Greece's contribution to ASPIICS, and initiated NELIOTA, a lunar-monitoring programme using the 1.2-metre Kryoneri telescope. Zhukov, A. N.; et al. including Tsinganos, K. (2026). "Ubiquitous small-scale dynamics in the slow solar wind formation region observed by Proba-3/ASPIICS". The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 999(2), L41.