Stathis joined the School of Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Tech in the fall of 2005, after graduating at the top of his class in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) in Greece.  He received his MS degree in 2007 and his PhD degree in 2011 at Georgia Tech under the supervision of Professor Panagiotis Tsiotras.  His PhD thesis entitled: "Optimal Steering for Kinematic Vehicles with Applications to Spatially Distributed Agents," deals with feedback strategies for optimal intercept and task-assignment problems of groups of small UAVs in the presence of winds.  During the Spring of 2012 he was a post-doctoral fellow at the School of Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Tech working in optimal control and pursuit-evasion games for vehicles with kinodynamic constraints.