Family matters

On a warm October morning, the campus is bursting with fall color and Peter Daniolos has a tail-wagging 6-month-old German Shepherd named Ares in tow.

“I’ve met so many wonderful people on campus just by taking the dog for walks every day,” says Daniolos, a nationally recognized child and adolescent psychiatrist, and the new head of school’s husband.

Between life in a pandemic, moving across country, and getting acclimated to the Andover community, Daniolos has a perennially cheerful disposition, which earns him lifelong friends wherever he goes. The running family joke: He’ll stop for directions and get invited to a stranger’s house for dinner.

“I have a deep appreciation for people’s personal stories,” he says. “Why else are we here if not to connect with one other?”

His own family’s story is the classic American dream. His parents, Vasiliki and Demetrios Daniolos, were both raised on small Greek islands before meeting at medical school in Athens. They were the first Greek family to settle in Bismarck, North Dakota, making the front page of the The Bismarck Tribune. His father became a beloved physician in the community. His mother, now a widow, still happily resides in the home where Daniolos and his sister, Athena, were raised.

A professor of child and adolescent psychiatry (currently adjunct) at the University of Iowa Children’s Hospital, where he founded the Gender Evaluation Program, Daniolos met Kington while both were living and working in Washington, D.C., around 2001. They had a lot in common—physician fathers who emigrated from small island communities, deep philosophical interests, and a love of travel. The couple married in 2008, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“Parenthood,” he says when talking about their two sons, Emerson ’24 and Basil, “is the single best thing that has ever happened to me.”

Daniolos—who also served on the advisory council for the Grinnell College Museum of Art and on a prestigious scholarship committee to advance women—is looking forward to the next chapter of his family’s life on the East Coast.

As a new Andover parent, he recently joined a regional event that featured Kington as the speaker, when a question came his way. Daniolos was asked what experiences have stood out as quintessential New England. “People have been so generous with their recommendations. I love outdoor beauty, and the view of Boston from the top of Holt Hill is just magnificent,” he said. “And Crane Beach is one of the most beautiful in the country. It’s like Jamaica and Greece right there.”

Strolling the campus with a keen architectural eye, he also has a special affinity for the Gropius-designed dorms of Pine Knoll.

Making personal connections and living with eyes wide open are daily fuel for Daniolos’s optimism.

“I am touched by the outpouring of support from everyone here,” he says, while sweeping up a basket of freshly picked hydrangeas outside the front door of Phelps House—one of many welcome gifts the family has received. “It has really made us feel at home.”