Dr. Nikolaos Harkiolakis

Dr. Nicholas (Nick) Harkiolakis is an academic, researcher, and consultant whose career spans more than three decades and crosses computer science, business, and the natural sciences. He is Program Director for the PhD in Computer Science and Engineering at the European Institute of Management in Malta and Zurich, where he also supervises doctoral research. He is also Head of Research at Quantex Tech Limited in Hong Kong. He holds professorial appointments at the University of Nicosia – Athens, Hult International Business School, the European Forensic Institute, and the Digital University Group. Since 2016 he has taught and supervised in the Executive DBA program at École des Ponts ParisTech.

He began in the physical sciences, earning a BSc in Physics from the National University of Athens and studying aeronautical engineering at Cranfield University. He then completed a PhD in Computer Science at the Agricultural University of Athens, with a thesis on computer applications in biotechnology. Before entering academia, he served as an officer in the Hellenic Air Force, directing software development for aerodynamics and missile systems at the Air Force Research Center. He later founded a software company serving the Greek shipping industry and an education center for university preparation.

His academic leadership experience is extensive. He has chaired the Department of Computer Science at the University of La Verne's Athens campus and served as Director of Research at Hellenic American University. At Abu Dhabi Men's College he was Associate Dean for Business, Health and Technology, overseeing 1,200 students and 50 faculty. He has contributed to NEASC and WASC accreditation processes and served on an accreditation review team visiting the American University of Madaba in Jordan.

His research appointments include Senior Scientific Advisor at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics at the University of Oxford and Visiting Fellow at Brunel Business School. He was also technical coordinator of SEETSOC, a 15-partner EU FP7 smart-grid project. In total, he has secured more than $5 million in research funding.

Dr. Harkiolakis has published 63 scholarly works, 36 as lead author. His books include:

Leadership Explained: Leading Teams in the 21st Century

Multipreneurship: Diversification in Times of Crisis

E-Negotiations

Leadership and Change Management: A Cross-Cultural Perspective

Female Immigrant Entrepreneurs

The Multiple Case Study Design

widely used texts on quantitative and qualitative research methods

The Law of Conservation of Value (World Scientific, 2025), which sets out his conservationist approach to economics

His research ranges widely: immigrant and family entrepreneurship, leadership, fintech, social network analysis of covert networks, generative AI governance in higher education, blockchain tokenomics, and machine learning applications from exoplanet classification to protein backbone torsion prediction.

He is an active editor. He serves on the editorial team of Frontiers in AI, is Editor of the International Journal of Teaching and Case Studies, and holds consulting and associate editor roles with the International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning, the International Journal of Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and the African Journal of Business & Economic Research. He was General Chair of the IEEE/ACM-supported Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining conference in 2009.

He is also a dedicated mentor, having guided more than 50 DBA and PhD candidates to successful defenses. His teaching covers artificial intelligence, machine learning, data mining, predictive analytics, project management, leadership, and research methods.

Outside the university, he has been Executive Vice President for Europe and the Middle East and Director of Research at Executive Coaching Consultants since 2012. In that role he advises professionals, corporations, and family enterprises on leadership, technology, and entrepreneurship. Across all of this work, he connects rigorous quantitative methods with practical problems in organizations and in science.