Harilaos N. Psaraftis is Professor of Maritime Transport  at the School of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering (NA&ME) of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Greece. He has a diploma from NTUA (1974), two M.Sc. degrees (1977) and a Ph.D. (1979) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He has been a faculty member at MIT from 1979 to 1989 (Department of Ocean Engineering, and also affiliated with the Operations Research Center and the Center for Transportation Studies). While at MIT he was awarded the first-prize of the 1979 contest of transport-related PhD theses by the Transportation Science Section of ORSA (the Operations Research Society of America) and the Henry L. Doherty Professorship in Ocean Utilization (1979-1981). He received tenure at MIT in 1985, but left MIT to return to Greece in 1989. He was Head of NA&ME at NTUA from 1993 to 1995 and served as Director of the Division of Ship Design and Maritime Transport at NA&ME during the academic years 2003-2004 and 2007-2008, and as Deputy Head of NA&ME during the academic year 2004-2005.

Psaraftis heads the Laboratory for Maritime Transport (LMT), an educational and research unit within the School of NA&ME, informally in place since 1989 and formally established  as a NTUA Lab in 2006 (www.martrans.org). LMT has twice won a Lloyd’s List Greek Shipping Award. In 2008 it won the “Piraeus International Centre Award,” which is for Greek or non-Greek entities that have demonstrated outstanding service to Greek shipping clients or members, and/or have made an outstanding contribution to the development of Greece as a shipping business and service center. And in 2010, LMT won the “Award for Achievement in Safety or Environmental Protection,” which is given to any Greek individual, crew, company or organization whose act, initiative or product has contributed to either safety or protecting the environment, or both.

In addition to his academic endeavors, Psaraftis has served as CEO of the Piraeus Port Authority (OLP) for close to 5 ½ years, from 1996 to 2002. Piraeus is the largest port in Greece, and one of the largest of the Mediterranean, with significant passenger and container traffic. Psaraftis’s tenure has been linked with such significant developments, among others, as (a) Pireaus putting itself on the list of the top 50 world container ports and the top hub of the Eastern Mediterranean, with traffic more than doubling from 575.000 TEU in 1996 to 1.160.000 TEU in 2001, and (b) OLP being transformed into a Corporation in 1999. In fact, Psaraftis is the only man in the port’s history to serve as CEO under both institutional regimes, that of a public law undertaking and that of a Corporation. He is also the 2nd longest serving CEO since OLP’s inception in 1930, having served under 4 Ministers of Merchant Marine and 4 Presidents or Acting Presidents of the Board.
For more on Psaraftis and OLP, please click here.

Psaraftis's expertise is in maritime and intermodal transport. At MIT he headed research projects on cargo ship routing and scheduling, scheduling of urban paratransit systems, management of marine oil spill response,  automated mission and trajectory planning, and the use of graphics for educational curricula in mathematical programming. At NTUA he has been project manager of several major research projects in practically all areas of maritime transport (EC DG-TREN and DG-RTD projects ATOMOS, THAMES, ATOMOS II, SAFECO, SAFECO II, DISC,  DISC II, PROSIT, SSS-CA, ATOMOS IV, ADVANCES, THEMES, EVIMAR, TRAPIST, MTCP, MOSES, plus, the oil spill response projects OSH and  EU-MOP. He has been overall project manager of the Concerted Action on Shortsea Shipping (project SSS-CA), an umbrella project overseeing European R&D in shortsea shipping, ports, maritime logistics and intermodal transport, and in which 14 European countries participated (1995 – 2000). Psaraftis has also been overall project manager in project EU-MOP (Elimination Units for Marine Oil Pollution, 2005 -2008), and has assumed the same position for new EC (DG-MOVE) project SuperGreen on the subject of European Green Corridors (2010-2013). He  also headed national projects on oil spill response and on Greek coastal shipping. His team within the Laboratory of Maritime Transport also participated in EU projects INTEGRATION, POP&C and CHINOS and in Greek project AEGEAN. LMT was also engaged in 3-year projects funded by Norwegian and American classification societies Det Norske Veritas (DNV) and American Bureau of Shipping (ABS) respectively. The DNV project (2008-2010) involved developing models for maritime security and for studying the emissions-logistics interface, whereas  the ABS project (2008-2011) involved environmental risk evaluation criteria and ship emissions on a lifecycle basis. Other projects included a 2-year collaborative research grant with the National University of Singapore  on the analysis of optimal containership size and its impact on liner operations (2008-2010), sponsored by the NOL Fellowship Programme, and a study on ship air emissions from the Hellenic Chamber of Shipping (2008). Last but not least, LMT is a key pillar  of the new NTUA “Centre of Excellence in Ship Total Energy-Emissions-Economy,” funded by The Lloyd’s Register Educational Trust (2010-2015). 

Psaraftis has published his work in journals including Operations Research, Management Science, Annals of Operations Research, Transportation Science, Transportation Research (B and D), European Journal of Operational Research, Journal of Ship Research, Marine Technology, Maritime Economics and Logistics, WMU Journal of Maritime Affairs, Maritime Policy and Management, Marine Pollution Bulletin, Journal of Transportation Security and Networks. His published work  includes two books, over 100 refereed articles in journals and conferences, over 80 other publications and over 120 lectures in various other conferences. He has also chaired and organized several conference sessions and clusters on topics such as intermodal transport, maritime transport, ports, vehicle routing, and logistics. Among others, he has been a member of the organizing committee of the 1994 and 1996 European Research Roundtable Conferences on Shortsea Shipping (held in Athens and Bergen-Norway respectively) and keynote speaker of the 1994 conference. He was also a member of the scientific committee of TRISTAN I, II and VII (Triennial International Symposium on Transportation Analysis), held in Montreal-Quebec, Canada in 1991 in Capri, Italy in 1994, and in Tromsø, Norway in 2010. He is also a member of the scientific committee of the 2012 Portuguese Operations Research Conference, the 2012 International Research Conference on Short Sea Shipping (also to be held in Portugal) and the 5th International Workshop on Freight Transportation and Logistics (“Odysseus”), to be held in Mykonos (2012).   He has been chairman of the papers committee of the 1st International Symposium on Ship Operations, Management and Economics (SOME), organized by SNAME’s Greek section in Athens in May of 2005 and chairman of the International Symposium on Maritime Safety, Security and Environmental Protection (SSE07), organized by LMT in Athens in September of 2007. Among other engagements, he was keynote speaker at the MLOG 2009 International Conference on Maritime Logistics and Supply Chain Systems in Singapore, at the 2009 Conference on Fast Sea Transportation in Athens and the 2009 IMAM International Conference in Istanbul, Turkey, and at the 2010 AIRO conference of the Italian Operations Research Society in Calabria, Italy. Psaraftis was the chairman of the 3rd SOME Symposium (October 2010), and will assume the same role in the 4th SOME Symposium (November 2012).

Psaraftis has represented Greece on the Management Committee of the "Transport" R&D Programme (1994-1998) and on the management Committee of the COST 330 program (EDI in ports). He has also represented Greece and the port of Piraeus within the European Sea Ports Organization (ESPO) during his tenure at the port. In Greece he served as a member of the National Research Advisory Council (1994-1996), and from 1995 to 2002 he was a member of the Greek Committee of DNV, being the only member of that committee who was not a ship owner. In 2001 he was a member of the Ministry of Merchant Marine committee of experts to recommend the basic principles for Greece’s cabotage new institutional regime. Since 2002, LMT is an Associate Member of the International Association of Ports and Harbors (IAPH),  and Psaraftis is a member of IAPH’s Port Operations and Logistics and Port Environment Committees.  He was a member of the Steering Committee of the Strategic Project in Maritime Transportation and Logistics of SINTEF, Norway (2006-2008). Since 2006 he has been an active member of the Greek delegation to the International Maritime Organization (IMO), both at the Maritime Safety Committee (MSC) and the Marine Environment Protection Committee (MEPC). In that capacity, he has served as Coordinator of an MEPC Correspondence Group, tasked to study the subject of Environmental Risk Acceptance Criteria in Formal Safety Assessment (2007-2010), and chaired two related Working Groups, at MEPC 60 (2010) and MEPC 62 (2011). In 2009 he was appointed to the MSC Group of Experts on Formal Safety Assessment, tasked to review FSA studies submitted to the IMO and in 2010 to the MEPC Group of Experts on Market Based Measures for Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions (both ongoing activities). In 2011 he was invited by the European Commission (DG-CLIMA) as an expert to Working Group of the European Climate Change Programme (ECCP) on reducing GHG missions from ships, and by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) to the Group of Experts on Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation for International Transport Networks (both ongoing activities).

Since 1987 Psaraftis is an Associate Editor of Transportation Science, a publication of INFORMS. In 1999 he was Guest Editor for a focused issue on maritime transportation. He is also on the Editorial Board of the WMU Journal of Maritime Affairs, a publication of the World Maritime University. He has served as referee in more than 35 journals and conferences, as proposal evaluator for the US Sea Grant College Program and for the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, as academic certification evaluator for the Ministry of Education and Culture of Cyprus and as faculty promotion and tenure evaluator for the following universities: University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), MIT, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde, National University of Singapore, and World Maritime University. He served as chairman of the adjudication panel for the Lloyds List 2004 and 2007 Greek Shipping Awards, and was elected President of the MIT Club of Greece for the period 2005-2007, chairman of SNAME’s Greek Section for the period 2006-2008 and member of the board of the Hellenic Association of Maritime Economists (ENOE) for the period 2008-2010.

(last updated: Oct. 2011)