alexis Supervised by: Susan Eisenbach

Alexis  was a PhD student from 2004 to 2008

What is he doing now: He co-funded a start-up called modelogiq (http://www.modelogiq.com/) and he is currently a partner in the consulting business Synergy Softworks.

Dr. Petrounias has been creating software for over a decade. He has transitioned companies from idea to end product, established software houses and engineering workflow for large enterprises, managed teams of engineers, and co-founded a financial modeling startup.

In Germany and in Greece having a PhD is considered a very big deal and it basically guarantees that almost all "doors will open” with both technical and - more crucially - non-technical stakeholders. I keep up with programming languages in particular and have managed to get my team to work in more productive ways, for instance by using Clojure. Without extensive exposure to the topics studied in my PhD I would be ridiculously cautious and would never dare use a Lisp in production. On a personal level, the network of casual friends from the PhD years has made it easier to build teams of software engineers and attract investors. For instance, my startup has hired two mathematicians from Max Planck in Leipzig - this would be impossible without a network of other PhD’s in physics and mathematics, as these people typically don’t show up in programming communities or job boards and so on. I suspect this is even more important for anyone who wants to work in the machine learning or “big data” space