Prof. George Kiriakidis is a Physicist graduate of the Aristotelian Univ. of Thessaloniki and post-graduate studies at the Universities of Manchester, Salford, and Surrey, UK, who served as a full Prof. at the Physics Department of the Univ. of Crete, Greece from 1981 to 2017.
In his career as a materials engineer, he founded and led the Transparent Conductive Materials (TCM) research group at IESL/FORTH (Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas) for more than 30 years studying the electrical, optical structural, and chemical properties of metal oxides for electronic, sensing, and photocatalytic applications. He was elected as vice-president and later as president of the European Materials Research Society (E-MRS) in the period 2013-2019 and served as Adjunct Prof. at the Univ. of West Virginia (USA)(2014-17) and Univ. of Huddersfield (UK) (2015-19).
G. Kiriakidis was the founder and director of MITOS SA, the 1st spin-off of FORTH in 1988, co-founder and 1st director of the Science and Technology Park of Crete (STEP-C) in 1994, and board member of the Management company of STEP-C since its establishment. Recently, in 2019, he co-founded and now serves as CEO of PCN Materials, a new start-up, spin-off of FORTH producing novel visible light photocatalytic materials with depollution and disinfection attributes for indoor clean-air applications.
