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Professor Apostolos Voulgarakis of the School of Chemical Engineering and Environmental Engineering at the Technical University of Crete has surpassed 20,000 citations by other researchers of his published research work, according to Google Scholar, which, as of August 2026, records 20,125 citations (h-index 55).

This outstanding achievement once again confirms the high-quality research work produced by the academic and research staff of the Technical University of Crete.

A few words about Professor Apostolos Voulgarakis:

Professor Apostolos Voulgarakis holds the AXA Chair for Wildfires and Climate, based at the Technical University of Crete. He is the Director of the Atmospheric Environment and Climate Change Laboratory, a dynamic and growing research group that studies the relationship between climate change, atmospheric pollution, and wildfires.

He is an expert in the modelling of the global atmospheric and Earth system. In particular, his work has focused on fire–climate interactions and on the impact of wildfires on levels of major air pollutants and particulate matter.

After completing undergraduate studies in Physics (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 2002), postgraduate studies in Environmental Engineering (Technical University of Crete, 2004), and a PhD in Atmospheric Chemistry (University of Cambridge, 2008), he held positions at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University (2009–2012), before moving to Imperial College London, where he served as Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, and Associate Professor during the period 2012–2019.

In collaboration with the UK Met Office, Apostolos Voulgarakis and his team led the development of the first wildfire model (INFERNO) to be incorporated into the United Kingdom’s Earth system model (UKESM1), the UK’s primary tool, and one of the most established globally, for official climate and Earth system projections.

Dr Voulgarakis has led and participated in numerous other international research programmes funded by NASA, the European Commission, the UK Natural Environment Research Council, the British Council, the UK National Centre for Earth Observation, and the General Secretariat for Research and Technology, with collaborators from around the world (including the UK, USA, China, India, Greece, France, and Norway).

He has also played important roles in major global climate model comparison initiatives, such as the Atmospheric Chemistry & Climate Modeling Intercomparison Project (ACCMIP), the Precipitation Driver Response Model Intercomparison Project (PDRMIP), the Fire Model Intercomparison Project (FireMIP), and the Chemistry-Climate Model Initiative (CCMI). He also contributed as an author to two chapters of the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR5).

Google Scholar:

Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes and provides access to the full text of scholarly literature across a wide range of publication formats and academic disciplines. The Google Scholar index includes highly regarded online scientific journals and books, conference proceedings, dissertations, preprints, abstracts, technical reports, and other scholarly research materials.