Pagona Papakonstantinou is a professor of advanced materials at the School of Engineering and specializes in the R&D of novel materials and multifunctional architectures for their strategic implementation in energy storage/conversion, structural and healthcare sectors. She is an Invited Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) through the ‘Leaders in the Field’ scheme for her contributions to the field of nanomaterials and nanoscience. She received a Royal Academy of Engineering/Leverhulme Trust Senior Fellowship (2011) and a Distinguished Research Fellowship from Ulster University (2003). She received a BSc (Hons) degree in Physics from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece (1988) and a PhD in Physics from the Queen’s University of Belfast (1994). She was appointed to a Lectureship at Ulster in 1998 and promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2004 and Personal Chair in 2009. Before this she undertook several post-doctoral positions including: magneto-optical material research at Queen’s University Belfast; fs direct laser micro-deposition at the Institute of Electronic Structure and Laser (IESL) in Crete and industrial research on Silicon on Insulator (SOI) technologies at Analogue Devices.
James Davis is a Professor of Biomedical Sensors at the School of Engineering and a member of the Engineering Research Institute. He obtained his BSc and PhD in Chemistry from the University of Paisley. He is a member of the Royal Society of Chemistry and has held Chartered Chemist status since 1996. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and teaches Engineering Fundamentals, Physical Sciences 2, Professional Skills and Advanced Medical Sensors. His research interests are directed toward the development of new diagnostic devices for the rapid treatment of disease and injury. He has published more than 180 publications in peer-reviewed journals with an h-index of 37 (Scopus, April 2024).
