ENVE-X - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Member of the ENVE - X TEAM
Dr. Alberto Gotti is a physicist of the University of Milan with over 24 years of experience in environment and health impact assessment, data assimilation and exposure modelling. In the last fifteen years, he has worked for the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (EC-DG-JRC), for the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (CERTH). From 2013 until today he is a scientific associate of the Laboratory of Environmental Engineering, Department of Chemical Engineering, Polytechnic School of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, focusing mainly on exposure to environmental hazards and their impact on health, and from 2015 he works as a researcher at the European Center for Training and Research in Mechanical Earthquakes (Centro Europeo di Formazione e Ricerca in Ingegneria Sismica) in Pavia, Italy.
Dr. Gotti has an extensive experience on environment and health impact assessment, exposure modelling including biologically-based toxicokinetics/dynamic models (PBTK/PD), development of dose-response relationships based on both mechanistic Biology-Based Dose Response (BBDR) modelling and epidemiological approach through statistical modeling, climate change processes and policies, advanced use of GIS for environment and health impact assessment, data fusion comprising the assimilation and integration of data from different information sources, advanced statistical data analysis and techniques (Markov Chain Monte Carlo) to assess and reduce uncertainty in human health risk assessment, air quality assessment using satellite data. He has participated in writing 35 papers in scientific journals, 120 papers in scientific conferences on a subject related to his research interests, and has participated in the implementation of 15 European projects related to links between environment quality and human health.
Dr. Gotti was from 2014 to 2018 Vice-President of the Mediterranean Scientific Association of Environmental Protection (MESAEP). In 2018 he was appointed as Treasurer of the Association.
Job Titles:
- Member of the ENVE - X TEAM
- Engineer from the Technical University of Aachen
Dr. Antonios Gypakis is a chemical engineer from the Technical University of Aachen (RWTH) from where he graduated in 1993. He continued his graduate studies in environmental science at the same university until 1997 and he got his PhD from the University of Duesseldorf in 1999.
He holds an MBA from the Athens University of Economics and Business that he obtained in 2005. He has worked as a senior scientific officer of General Secretariat for Research and Technology (GSRT) in detachment by the National Hellenic Research Foundation, responsible for EU Common Technological Initiatives. He is also the National Project Coordinator of the EUREKA Bureau of the Technological Development Directorate of GSRT.
He is Deputy National Representative of the Programme Committee of the SC5 "Climate Action, Resource Efficiency and Raw materials" of HORIZON 2020 and NCP for the same SC. Furthermore he acts as Deputy National Representative of the States Representatives Group to the Fuel Cells and Hydrogen 2 Joint Undertaking. He is member of the Steering Committee GSRT-JRC. Active participation in strategy development for Energy & Innovation 2014 - 2020. Coordination of the national platform for the environment within the new programming period 2014-2020.
Dr. Catherine Gabriel is a graduate of the Chemical Engineering Department of the Engineering School of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She holds a postgraduate degree in General and Inorganic Chemical Technology from the Department of Chemistry of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki where she has completed a postgraduate thesis entitled "Study of distribution of new triorganotin compounds with hydroxyanthraquinones in binary solvent systems". She also holds a doctorate degree, which took place at the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory of the Department of Chemical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, on "Synthesis, Isolation and Physicochemical Characterization of O-, N- Organic Substrates and Metallotoxins".
She has been working as a postgraduate researcher for four years 2011-2015 with scholarships: a) Postdoctoral Research as a Fellow of the State Scholarship Foundation (IKY) at the Department of Chemical Engineering, Laboratory of Inorganic Chemistry Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, on the subject: "Development of the chemistry of insulinomimetic materials of vanadium and zinc in type II diabetes (Diabetes mellitus II)". b) Post-doctoral Research as a Fellow of the Research Committee of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki at the Laboratory of Inorganic Chemistry of the Department of Chemical Engineering of the Polytechnic School of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki with subject "Synthesis, isolation and study of metal-pharmaceutical materials with insulinimimetic activity" and c) Postdoctoral Research as a Fellow of the State Scholarship Foundation (IKY) program SIEMENS, in the Laboratory of Inorganic Chemistry of the Department of Chemical Engineering of the Polytechnic School of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, entitled "Heterometallic 3d-4f lanthanidic hybrid MOF materials with applications in catalysis and sensors.
Over the last three years she has been working on a research level by analyzing samples on analytical instruments of which liquid LC-MS/MS mass spectroscopy, and NMR spectroscopy. Primarily these samples are of such environmental interest, samples from ground and underground waters for qualitative and quantitative detection of medicinal drugs and pesticides as well as biological interest, biological samples for qualitative analysis and metabolite detection. Moreover, it performs analyzes of samples from organic synthesis as well as identification of inorganic metal compounds.
Job Titles:
- Member of the ENVE - X TEAM
- Professor of Environmental Engineering at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Dr. Denis Sarigiannis is Professor of Environmental Engineering at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece, Associate Professor of Environmental Health Engineering at the Institute for Advanced Study (IUSS) in Pavia, Italy, and Director of the PhD program on Environmental Chemical Risk at the Institute of Advanced Studies (IUSS) of Pavia in Italy and visiting Professor at the University of Paris Descartes, the Medical Schools of the University of Athens and the University of Crete and the School of Life Sciences of the University of Thessaly in Greece. He is President of the Mediterranean Scientific Association for Environmental Protection, Vice-President of the Hellenic Society of Toxicology, member of the Expert Committee on Air Pollution of the Greek Ministry of Health and advisor to the WHO European Centre for Environment and Health. In 2015 he received the Bo Holmstedt award from EUROTOX and the Bo Holmstedt Foundation for his contributions to the safety of drugs and chemicals.
Prior to that, Dr. Sarigiannis was the scientific coordinator of the Institute for Health and Consumer Protection (IHCP) of the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC), where he led the activities on Consumer Products and Nutrition, Consumer Product Safety and Quality, Human Exposure to Environmental Stressors and Health Effects and on Risk Assessment of Chemicals at the European Chemicals Bureau, and has been Scientific Assistant to the JRC Director General, Strategy Manager of IHCP, and Head of the Complex Systems Modeling sector at the JRC Institute for Systems, Informatics and Safety. From 2006 to 2010 he served on the Scientific Committee on Chronic Risks of INERIS, the National Institute for Environmental and Industrial Risk of France. From 2002 to 2006 he served on the EU Health Security Committee and the Health and Environment Working Party of the European Commission and from 2002 to 2004 he was the Secretary of the Joint Research Centre Scientific Committee.
His research focuses on the unraveling of the human exposome to improve the health risk assessment of industrial and environmental toxicants and on internalizing health aspects into cyclical economy strategies. He is the author or co-author of more than 100 scientific papers published in the peer-reviewed literature and has led or contributed to 40 international research projects in the above areas. Currently he is the PI of the EU projects HEALS (Health and Environment-Wide Associations via Large Population Surveys), CROME (Cross-Mediterranean Environment and Health network), ICARUS (Integrated Climate Forcing and Air Pollution Reduction in Urban Systems), of the Integrated Training Network NEUROSOME (Exploring the Neurological Exposome) and member of the Management and Governing Board of the European Human Biomonitoring Initiative (HBM4EU) and of the COST action ISChNET (Industrially Contaminated Sites and Health Network).
Dr. Ilias Frydas was born in Thessaloniki, Greece, on 1st of July 1985. In 2003, he graduated from the 7th public high school of Kalamaria. After a year of study in the department of Physics, on November 2004 he started his studies in the department of Biology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, where he obtained a Diploma on Molecular Biology, Genetics and Biotechnology in November 2009.
Since the summer of 2009, he started working as an assistant researcher in the 2nd Peadiatrics Department of the University Hospital of Thessaloniki, studying various inflammatory pathways based on microarray analysis. In January 2011 he joined the Laboratory of Virology, at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, at the University of Ghent, where he started his PhD on PRRS virus. After his military service he worked at the Celixir pharmaceutical company and since January 2017 is a postdoctoral researcher at the laboratory of environmental engineering at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
He is trained in Molecular Biology, Genetics and Biotechnology, Department of Biology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (B.Sc.) and a PhD in the Laboratory of Virology, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, University of Gent, Belgium. His scientific interest rely on design and development of ex vivo explant organ systems, immunofluorescence and immunohistochemistry, while his laboratory skills include RNA extraction, SDS-PAGE, PCR, RT-PCR, Microarray, ELISA and ELISA-based assays, flowcytometry, cell sorting and Chromatography (Column Chromatography and HPLC).
He is the author and co-author of several publications in international peer-reviewed journals, and the results of his work were presented in several international conferences.
Job Titles:
- Member of the ENVE - X TEAM
- Environmental Scientist With a Postgraduate and
Dr. Ioannis Zarkadas is an Environmental scientist with a postgraduate and PhD in Environmental Management and with a special knowledge of the processes related to environmental pollution and how these may ultimately lead to adverse health effects. His research interests are related to the production of pollutants resulting from waste management, with the ultimate goal of reducing the environmental impact of a variety of productive processes.
He has participated actively in the successful realization of 7 research projects, 5 of which are related to the effects of the environment on health (HEALS, CROME, CHERRIE, PEC, GRIN, ICARUS) and has participated in writing 5 articles in scientific journals with 22 participants scientific conferences on a subject related to his research interests.
In recent years it has been extensively engaged in bioenergy production either as a sole substrate or by adding other negative substrates to increase yield and at the same time reduce organic load to reduce the environmental footprint and subsequent human exposure, developing models for human exposure from environmental factors. In recent years he has been extensively engaged in the utilization of waste from various production sectors, while studying bioenergy production either as a sole substrate or adding other substrates to increase yield and reduce organic load. Furthermore, he is also working on active remediation technologies such as wastewater treatment with membrane technologies.
Dr. Marianthi Kermenidou is an environmental engineer (Faculty of Engineering, Democritus University of Thrace) with postgraduate degree in "Underground Hydraulics" (Faculty of Civil Engineering, DUTH) and Ph.D. from the Department of Chemical Engineering of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTh), is a researcher at the Laboratory of Environmental Engineering of the Department of Chemical Engineering, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
Job Titles:
- Member of the ENVE - X TEAM
Dr. Spyros Karakitsios is specialized in environmental pollution, environmental risk, data synthesis and validation and health impact assessment.
He is a member of the Research Group for Exposome and Health (HERACLES) of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Innovation (KEDEK). The purpose of the HERACLES team is to analyze and understand the individual mechanisms of the impact of environmental factors on human health, from conception to death. Dr. Karakitsios is involved in the analysis of environmental pollution data in order to more accurately map the exposure (and the relative internal dose) of the population to a large number of pollutants that end up in humans with multiple exposure mechanisms.
From 2011 until now he is a scientific collaborator of the Laboratory of Environmental Engineering, Department of Chemical Engineering, Engineering School of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, with the main object of chemicals risk assessment.
From 2008 to 2011, he worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Joint Research Center of the European Commission in Ispra, Italy, on issues related to exposure to environmental pollutants and health effects, and from 2002 to 2008 Postgraduate and Ministry Doctoral researcher at the University of Ioannina on issues related to human exposure.
He has participated in the writing of about 60 articles in scientific journals, 171 papers in scientific conferences, on topics related to his research interests. He has also participated in the implementation of 11 European projects related to environment and health, including NEUROSOME, HBM4EU, HEALS, CROME, CheRRIE, BlueHealth, Transphorm, URGENCHE, INTEGRA, INTERA and TAGS. In 2017 he won the Innovation Award for Chemical Risk Analysis by the European Chemical Industry Council.
Mrs. Papaioannou Nausica is a Ph.D. candidate in the Chemical Engineering Department at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She holds a diploma in Chemical Engineering, which was awarded with 7.69/10 («Very Good»), graduated from Polytechnic School of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Her Diploma Thesis, titled << Metabolic pathway analysis in human samples and links with exposure to metals and phthalates and the corresponding effects on psychokinetic development of children>>, was awarded with Excellence. She works as a research chemical engineer from 2015 in European projects (ΗΕΑLS, HBM4EU, κ.α) at the Environmental Engineering Laboratory at the School of Chemical Engineering of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Her research activities focus on the use of analytical and computational methods and tools of systems biology to assess the impact of long-term exposure to environmental pollutants on human health. She is also having experience in analytical techniques (LC-MS, NMR) for the analysis of environmental and biological samples.