Rate My Professor Dimitris Anastassiou

Dimitris Anastassiou is the Charles Batchelor Professor of Electrical Engineering and Professor of Systems Biology in Columbia University's Engineering faculty. He received his Diploma from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, in 1974, followed by an M.S. in 1975 and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1979 from the University of California, Berkeley. After completing his doctorate, he worked as a Research Staff Member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, from 1979 to 1983. In 1983, he joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University as Assistant Professor, was promoted to Associate Professor in 1985, and to Professor in 1992, a position he holds today. He served as Acting Chairman of the department from September 1999 to December 2000 and as Visiting Associate Professor in the Division of Computer Science at the National Technical University of Athens during the 1985-1986 academic year. Anastassiou has directed the Genomic Information Systems Laboratory at Columbia since 2002 and previously led the Image and Advanced Television Laboratory from 1985 to 2000.

His research career began with contributions to video technology, including high-performance digital image and video coding techniques, before shifting to computational biology. Current interests center on biomolecular data mining, systems-based analysis of cancer datasets from biopsies, discovery of biomolecular mechanisms in cancer, and diagnostic, prognostic, and therapeutic applications in personalized medicine. Key publications include "Genomic Signal Processing" (IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, 2001), "Computational Analysis of the Synergy Among Multiple Interacting Genes" (Molecular Systems Biology, 2007), "Biomolecular events in cancer revealed by attractor metagenes" (PLOS Computational Biology, 2013), "Single-cell analysis reveals the pan-cancer invasiveness-associated transition of adipose-derived stromal cells into COL11A1-expressing cancer-associated fibroblasts" (PLOS Computational Biology, 2021), and "CASCC: A co-expression assisted single-cell RNA-seq data clustering method" (Bioinformatics, 2024). Anastassiou's achievements are honored with the IEEE Fellowship in 1998 for video technology contributions, National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award from 1986 to 1991, IBM Outstanding Innovation Award in 1982, IBM Invention Achievement Award in 1983, Great Teacher Award from the Society of Columbia Graduates in 2001, and the 2026 IEEE Arun N. Netravali Video Analytics, Technology and Systems Award.