Giorgos Lianis

George (Georgios) Lianis (, 1926–2008) was a Greek scholar, activist, diplomat, and cabinet member of the first term of government of PASOK, in 1981–1985. As cabinet member responsible for higher education, he authored the 1982 university reform that introduced the departmental system as a replacement for the professorial chair system and that established graduate schools. Then in 1983-1985, as Greece’s first Minister of Research and Technology, he was instrumental in supporting the introduction of information technology and alternative energy, reorganizing the national research institutes, and establishing the system of centers of research innovation and excellence. Early life Born in Naoussa, northern Greece, in 1926. During the Axis occupation, he was active in the youth resistance group EPON. In 1953 he graduated from the National Technical University of Athens with a degree in mechanical and electrical engineering. He received a PhD from Imperial College London in 1956 in mechanical engineering with a specialty in plasticity. Patras and dictatorship years He had moved to the USA where he was professor of aerospace engineering at Purdue University with more than 75 publications in the fields of continuum thermodynamics and the relativistic physics of continuous media During this time, he first addressed the question of higher education reform in Greece. In 1964 he was invited to help organize at Patras, Greece, a new university incorporating a departmental system to replace the more hierarchical chair system then in use. This attempt at change ignited such overwhelming opposition, not only in the academy but also in the government itself, that any attempt at alteration was rejected. The pursuit of reform was put on hold by the military dictatorship of 1967-1974. During this time in exile Lianis worked against the dictatorship, first as a member and later as the general secretary of the Panhellenic Liberation Movement (PAK) - North America. Upon the fall of the dictatorship he returned to Greece where he became professor in the chair of Mechanics at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and head of PASOK - Thessaloniki. Higher Education Reform of 1982