Yiannis Vlassopoulos earned a degree in Mathematics from the University of Athens in1992 and a Ph.D from Duke University in 1998.
His thesis was on Algebraic Geometry related to String Theory (specifically so called Mirror Symmetry, a duality between Symplectic and Algebraic Geometry). He obtained a Marie Curie Individual Fellowship with Pr. Maxim Kontsevich at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques (IHES) in Paris, in 2002.
He subsequently worked as a researcher in IHES for an extended period of time until 2019, on non-Commutative Derived Algebraic Geometry and Topological Quantum Field Theories. In particular, in collaboration with Maxim Kontsevich, they introduced the notion of Pre-Calabi-Yau algebra which is a non-commutative analogue of a Poisson structure.
He also worked as a visiting Professor at the University of Vienna (Austria) and has been a visiting fellow at the University of Miami, Aarhus University (Denmark), the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn and the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at the Stoney Brook University in NY.
He obtained an ENTER fellowship at the University of Athens for the period 2006-2008.

Since 2015 he has focused on Natural Language modelling. Initially, using Tensor Networks and applying algebra and physics technics. He cofounded a company in NY in 2017 in order to develop this technology. Currently he is using Category Theory and Tropical geometry in order to model the structure that Transformer Neural Networks (like GPT) learn when they are trained to guess the next word in a text. One of the main goals is to understand how semantics is encoded and could potentially be controlled as far as logical implications are concerned.