Professor Emeritus Dimitrios Pandermalis was born in Thessaloniki in 1940. He studied history and archaeology and subsequently German language and literature at the Aristotle University in Thessaloniki. He then did post-graduate studies at Freiburg, Germany where he received a doctorate in 1968. The following year, by decision of the Philosophical School of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, he was appointed Assistant (Epimeletes) at the Museum of Casts. He was later elected Assistant Professor and in 1979, Professor of Classical Archaeology. He has taught at the University of Thessaloniki since 1969. His lectures encompass most branches of classical archaeology: architecture, sculpture, painting, epigraphy and public and private life in antiquity. He has organized many archaeological tours for students both in Greece and abroad and lectured at more than eighty universities and museums around the world.

Since 1973 he has been Director of the University Archaeological Excavations at Dion. Since 1996 he has been carrying out programs at Dion to convert the excavated area into an extensive archaeological park.

Dimitrios Pandermalis has served as President of the History and Archaeological Department and Dean of the Philosophical School of the University of Thessaloniki. He was the President of the State Theatre of Northern Greece and is a member of the Archaeological Society of Athens and the German Archaeological Institute of Berlin. He is the Honorary President of the Executive Committee of the International Foundation of Alexander the Great and of the Tellogleion Art Foundation. In 1997 during the period Thessaloniki was cultural capital of Europe, he was curator of the exhibition ‘Alexander the Great and the East’ at the Small Palace and in 2004 was curator for the exhibition ‘Alexander the Great: Treasures from an Epic Era of Hellenism’ in New York for the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation.

From September 1996 to March 2000 he served as Country Member of the Greek Parliament and in 1999 was elected President of the Permanent Inter-Party Committee of the Parliament for Greeks Abroad. In May 2000 the Hellenic Council of Ministers unanimously elected him President of the Organization for the Construction of the New Acropolis Museum and in June 2009 he was appointed President of the Acropolis Museum.