BIO

Kostas is ICREA Research Professor in Life & Medical Sciences and Severo Ochoa Distinguished Professor at the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2) in Barcelona (Spain) leading the Nanomedicine Lab. He is also Professor of Nanomedicine at the Centre for Nanotechnology in Medicine, part of the Faculty of Biology, Medicine & Health and the Manchester Cancer Research Centre at the University of Manchester (UK).​

He was born in Athens, Greece in 1971 and read Chemistry for his BSc at the University of Leeds (UK). He obtained his Diploma in Chemical Engineering and PhD in Chemical and Particle Engineering from the Department of Chemical Engineering at Imperial College London (UK), studying the steric stabilization of liposomes using block copolymer molecules (with Professors Th.F.Tadros and P.F.Luckham as advisors). He carried out his postdoctoral training in various medical institutions in the United States with D.Papahadjopoulos (UCSF, CA, USA), G.Sgouros (Memorial Sloan-Kettering, NY, USA) and R.G.Crystal (Weill Medical College of Cornell University, NY, USA) using liposomes to transport pDNA, radionuclides, viruses and small molecules for various therapeutic purposes.

Kostas was an Assistant Professor of Genetic Medicine & Chemical Engineering in Medicine at Cornell University Weill Medical College in 2002 when he relocated to the UK as the Deputy Director of Imperial College Genetic Therapies Centre in London (UK). In 2003 he established the Nanomedicine Lab as part of the Centre for Drug Delivery Research (CDDR) at the UCL School of Pharmacy. From 2003-2007 he was the Deputy Head of the CDDR with Professors Oya Alpar, Sandy Florence and Gregory Gregoriadis. He was promoted to the first personal Chair of Nanomedicine in the United Kingdom and Head of the CDDR in 2007. The entire Nanomedicine Lab was embedded within the Faculty of Medical and Human Sciences and the National Graphene Institute at the University of Manchester in 2013, working closely with Professor Sir Kostya Novoselov (Physics Nobel Laureate, 2010).​

He has been invited Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC), Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine (FRSM), and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA) all in the United Kingdom. In 2010 he was awarded the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Professorial Fellowship with the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Tsukuba, Japan (hosted by Professors Sumio Iijima and Masako Yudasaka). In 2024 he was awarded the JSPS BRIDGE Fellowship at the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Tokyo (hosted by Professor Shigeo Maruyama).