Georgios Aprilis, Scientist, Geosciences

"As an experimentalist, the ESRF is a great place to work. There is a good balance between hands-on lab work and routine office work. The many specialists here can help you out when in need and resources are abundant with equipment easily available. The people in my group are friendly and understanding. They have the same way of life as me and we all know what to expect!

I studied for my PhD in University of Bayreuth, Germany. During that time, I used to come to the ESRF almost every month as a user. When a post-doc position in high-pressure science opened at the Nuclear Resonance Beamline, I applied and found myself here. It was easy to work straight away, as I already knew the set-up and the people. Four years later on and I am a junior scientist on ID14 and ID28 for an ERC (European Research Council grant funded) project. We are building a prototype set-up with a laser-heated diamond anvil cell that will allow us to study candidate elements under conditions of extreme temperature and pressure in our quest to discover the full composition of the Earth’s core.

I am Greek and my wife is Russian. She is also a scientist at the ESRF. I find France is a good compromise for our mix of cultures. As a scientist, you travel around a lot, move between institutes and live in different places around the world. One advantage of the ESRF is that it is a meeting point, which is extremely convenient. In the circle of friends we have made over the years, almost everyone ends up at the ESRF at some point, either for a conference, workshop or as a user."

Georgios Aprilis grew up in Thessaloniki in Greece. He obtained a Diploma in electrical and computer engineering, which included a lot of desk-work with programming. Deciding this wasn’t for him, he then oriented his studies towards materials science, studying for a PhD at the University of Bayreuth in Bayreuth, Germany. He completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the ESRF on the Nuclear Resonance Beamline (ID18), before taking up a scientist position at the same beamline (now ID14) in 2023.