By Jacquie Russo
Staff Writer

California State University, Bakersfield has gained a new member to its physics and engineering department this quarter. The new assistant professor, Dr. Yiannis Ampatzidis, 34, came to CSUB after working at Washington State University for nearly three years. At WSU he was the postdoctoral research associate and co-project director. Before WSU, Ampatzidis lived and worked in his homeland, Greece. There, he worked as the adjunct assistant professor at Technological Educational Institute of Larisa.

Ampatzidis has published many research papers and has presented at numerous conferences in several
countries. He holds a bachelor degree in field crops and ecology. His second bachelor’s degree, as well
as his master’s degree, is in hydraulics, soil science and agricultural engineering. All of Ampatzidis’s
degrees, including his PhD in automations in precision farming and traceability, were awarded from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.

This quarter, Ampatzidis is teaching Engineering 160 and 161. One of his students, freshman, Apolinar
Quintero, pre-engineering major, said that Professor Ampatzidis is “nice and always tells us (his class)
what to expect.”

Rami Hamdallah, an electrical engineering major and freshman, spoke about his professor and his class. Hamdallah said Ampatzidis gives “really good advice” and “the most important thing for him is the teamwork.”

A current class project which relies upon teamwork is the making of a device to help disabled people.
This device will “prevent them from falling down,” said Hamdallah.

Beyond teamwork, Ampatzidis hope for his students is to give them a first-rate learning and research
experience and to give them internship opportunities. Ampatzidis said his favorite part of teaching is
“being around young people” and to “teaching them new things.”

A big part of Ampatzidis’s career is his research. One of his research projects right now is to develop
automatic data acquisition systems. With this device those in the agriculture community will be able to
“get information from the field and post everything to the cloud,” said Ampatizidis. “All this information
can be used to create maps, (and to) maybe use tables, figures,” said Ampatizidis.

Ampatzidis has mentioned his research to his students and hopefully they will be able to gain new
knowledge from that experience.

Outside of the classroom Ampatzidis loves to play soccer, basketball, and volleyball. He also swims and
likes to watch movies.