Sotirios J Vahaviolos

Sotirios J. Vahaviolos, 67, is the Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Mistras Group, the New Jersey-based global provider of technology-enabled asset protection solutions used to evaluate the structural integrity, safety and efficiency of critical energy, industrial and public infrastructure. With more than 100 offices and 45,100 employees in 16 countries, Mistras Group provides the majority of their services to clients on a regular, recurring outsourced basis. It monitors daily such historic bridges as the Ben Franklin bridge in Philadelphia Pa., the Severn bridge connecting England and Wales, the Bay Bridge in San Francisco, platforms and oil rigs in places including the North Sea, U.S.-based nuclear power plants, and other industrial plant facilities in countries all over the world daily, through the help of internet based online monitoring technologies based on satellites and other links. International clients are in the fields of oil and gas, fossil and nuclear power, public infrastructure, chemicals, aerospace and defense, transportation, primary metals and metalworking, pharmaceuticals and food processing. Vahaviolos, who was born in 1946 in historic Mistras, in the Peloponnese, as a child ripped apart electrical machinery and rebuilt it for fun – as well as for better safety in the newly electrified village. He came to United States to study engineering at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey, where he graduated first in his Science and Engineering class and went on, as a recipient of The Bell Laboratories Graduate Study Scholarship Program, to earn MS and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from Columbia University. He was also awarded a master’s degree in philosophy. He started his career at American Telephone & Telegraph’s Bell Laboratories, where the concept of acoustic emissions was developed in the late 1940s. Vahaviolos is married to Aspasia Nessas Vahaviolos, with whom he has three daughters: Athanasia Vahaviolos, who runs the Greek Mistras Group Hellas ABEE company serving the Balkans and Eastern Mediterranean countries, Stephanie-Athena Foglia, Mistras’ Benefits Manager, and Kristy Vahaviolos-Kyriakopoulos.