Dr. Anastassia Rissanou (January 2022 - October 2022)

Dr. Anastassia Rissanou is a physicist. She received her Batchelor and Master degrees from the Department of Physics of the University of Crete.  Her Masters was in the direction of Physics of Condensed Matter. Then, in 2003, she received her PhD, entitled “Simulation studies on Polymeric and Colloidal Systems” from the same department in collaboration with the Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas – Institute of Electronic Structure and Laser in Heraklion, Crete. After that, she worked as a postdoctoral fellow and research associate in various places. Among them, at the Institute of Physical Chemistry - Laboratory of Molecular Thermodynamics and Modeling of Materials NRCPS "Demokritos" and the Department of Chemical Engineering of Princeton University, New Jersey. She is an experienced researcher in topics related to the study of structural, dynamical and thermodynamical properties of complex systems of polymers, colloids, biological molecules and hybrid nanostructured materials. She is skilled in various simulation methods (Monte Carlo, Molecular Dynamics, Brownian Dynamics) at the atomistic and coarse-grained level, as well as multi-scale simulation techniques. She has worked on many joint simulation and experimental projects, something which supports her ability for collaboration with experimental groups. She is communicative and effective in the research projects that she works οn.  At CyI, her research focused on the study of small peptides as potential carriers for drug delivery, using atomistic simulations. She was recently appointed to the position of principal researcher at The National Hellenic Research Foundation, Athens, Greece, where she will work on the computational modelling of materials with molecular simulations and/or machine learning methods.

Dr. Petra Bacova (November 2020 - April 2021)

Dr. Petra Bacova is a physical chemist. She received her Ph.D degree from the University of the Basque Country in 2014 under the framework of Marie Curie ITN Dynacop. She spent various years as a post-doctoral fellow at IACM-FORTH in Crete, where she was involved (among others) in a project focused on nanostructured materials with application in energy under the Stavros Niarchos fellowship and in a project in collaboration with Goodyear. During her research stay in the Materials Physics Center in San Sebastian in 2016, she was part of a multidisciplinary national project concerning single-chain polymer nanoparticles. Her research interests include simulations of all types of polymer materials. As a postdoctoral researcher in the SimEA group, she addressed a well-known problem of the degree of star penetration and of the cooperative motion of star-like molecules in dense (melt) conditions, by employing atomistic molecular dynamics simulations in combination with specifically designed analysis tools. In addition, she has been involved in the project development of molecular simulation methods of polymeric nanocomposites for tire applications, in the framework of a research collaboration with the company Goodyear. Dr. Bacova is currently an associate researcher at the University of Cádiz (Spain) as a “María Zambrano” fellow in the frame of the Requalification Action for the Spanish University System 2021‐2023 (with the option of track-tenure position after 2023), financed by the Ministerial Order UNI/551/2021, which regulates the direct granting of subsidies to public universities. She maintains close research ties to the SimEA team, serving to expand our network of collaborators.

Dr. Awais Mahmood (November 2020 - August 2021)

Dr. Awais Mahmood is a Mechanical Engineer and has received his doctoral degree from Tsinghua University, China in June 2020. In the SimEA research group, he worked on the development of efficient computational techniques for engineering applications related to wetting and transport phenomena.