John Leonidas Volakis (; born May 13, 1956) is a Greek-American electrical engineer and academic specializing in computational electromagnetics, antenna design, and RF materials. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the National Academy of Inventors, and a recipient of the URSI Booker Gold Medal. He served as President of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society in 2004.
Volakis was born on the island of Chios, Greece, and grew up in the village of Olympi, one of the mastic villages in the south of the island. He immigrated to the United States in 1973 and attended Warren G. Harding High School before enrolling in university.
He received his B.S. from Youngstown State University in 1978, graduating summa cum laude, and his M.Sc. (1979) and Ph.D. (1982) from Ohio State University.
After completing his doctorate, Volakis worked at Rockwell International's North American Aircraft Operations (1982âÂÂ1984). In 1984, he joined the University of Michigan as an assistant professor of electrical engineering, becoming a full professor in 1994. He served as Director of the university's Radiation Laboratory from 1998 to 2000.
From 2003 to 2017, he held the Roy and Lois Chope Chair in Engineering at Ohio State University and directed the ElectroScience Laboratory (2003âÂÂ2016).
In 2017, he was appointed Dean of the College of Engineering and Computing at Florida International University, a position he held until 2023. He remains a professor in FIU's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Volakis's research has focused on computational electromagnetics, antenna miniaturization, wideband conformal antennas, wearable electronics, and RF materials. His work on hybrid finite element methods for microwave engineering has been widely adopted in commercial RF design software. His group has also contributed to research on tightly coupled dipole antennas, wireless passive neural recording devices, and approximate boundary conditions for electromagnetic scattering.