Dr. Panayiota Katsamba 

Dr. Katsamba is an applied mathematician with expertise in modelling the microscale mechanics arising from the interactions of fluid, elastic and chemical phenomena. Her research lies at the interface of physical mechanics, biomedicine and microengineering. She studied mathematics at the University of Cambridge, from which she graduated in 2014 with a BA (First Honours) and MMath (Distinction). She obtained her PhD in Applied Mathematics under the supervision of Prof Eric Lauga at the Department of Applied Mathematics of the University of Cambridge. Her doctoral thesis is titled `Biophysics of helices: Bacteria, viruses, and devices'. During her doctoral research (2014-2018), she explored the microscale mechanics of the motion of bacteria, viruses and magnetic micro-robots. Following her doctoral studies, she held the position of Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, working with Dr Montenegro-Johnson. During her postdoctoral research at Birmingham (2018-2020), she developed “Slender Phoretic Theory” for the study of chemically active filaments that offer novel control capabilities for microbots through shape transformation. She joined the Cyprus Institute in the summer of 2020 as a Research Fellow in the SimEA research team. Her research focuses on the development of data-driven, multi-scale computational approaches for the modelling of molecular systems.

Dr. Ioannis Tanis

Dr. Ioannis Tanis is a scientific modeler with more than 15 years of experience in molecular simulations. He holds a B.Sc in Physics from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and a M.Sc in Theoretical and Applied Fluid Dynamics from the University of Manchester, UK. His doctoral thesis focused on the study of the physicochemical properties of dendritic polymers and especially their applications in drug delivery via all-atom molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. In 2011, he moved to France and worked for several years as a postdoctoral researcher in both academic and industrial projects at the University of Savoie, ESPCI Paris and CEA. His research focused on polymer-based systems and their applications in diverse areas, ranging from natural gas purification to lubrication, using atomistic and coarse-grained MD simulations. Highly interested in modern technologies, he also has a diploma in Blockchain Development and attended courses in DevOps practices. He joined SimEA in 2022 and his current research focuses on polymer nanocomposite systems and the coupling between their conformational properties and their dynamic response.

Naveed works on seismic imaging along with remote sensing for energy applications within the RAISE project. His work aims to develop innovative Neural network (NN) architectures that can replace the Green’s function, the most computationally expensive part for simulation of seismic waves propagation. AI-based frameworks, such as Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) and the Fourier neural operator (FNO) are being developed to provide fast and efficient alternatives to the traditional deterministic approaches. Real field data set from the Netherlands has also been acquired to test the methodology.

He is involved in the RAISE project and deals with modelling of multiphase flows. More specifically, CFD datasets are generated and used for the training of physics-informed machine learning models in the domain of wetting hydrodynamics. Within this approach, low-accuracy analytical models are augmented with an AI part to provide efficient and reliable tools that can facilitate surface designing in applications that require controllable droplet transport (e.g. microfluidic devices).

Dr. Hilal Reda

He holds a prestigious Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship via the project NANOMEC. He works on the development of polymer nanocomposites (PNCs) for novel applications, which have attracted considerable interest in recent years due to the enhanced properties of PNCs, including mechanical rigidity, stiffness and toughness, electrical and thermal conductivity, etc. This project proposes a multiscale computational methodology to predict the mechanical properties of PNCs, which involves microscopic simulations, homogenization approaches and continuum models. A year into his project, he has published one article in “Computer method in applied material engineering” and has three submitted papers.

Panayiotis-Yiannis holds a diploma (5y) degree and a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA). Panayiotis-Yiannis Vrionis is a Mechanical Engineer in the Computation-based Science and Technology Research Center at the Cyprus Institute. He has experience in the development and application of Computational Fluid Dynamics software tools for the analysis and design of applications in the field of fluid mechanics. His specialties include Cartesian methods, adjoint methods for shape or topology optimization, numerical modelling of cavitating flows, and large-scale parallel computing. He joined SimEA team in 2022 and his current research focuses on the development of wetting hydrodynamics numerical tools for the analysis of flows in heterogeneous environments.