Associate Professor, Dr. Yiannis Pontikes, KU Leuven

Yiannis Pontikes was born in Heraklion, Greece, graduated as a Chemical Engineer from the Univ. of Patras (Greece) with a PhD from the same department, and has been since 2009 in Belgium, at the Department of Materials Engineering of KU Leuven. He is currently a BOF-ZAP associate professor there. He participates in different fora, centers and initiatives, and tries with his students and colleagues to leave something meaningful behind.

Yiannis Pontikes is leading the Sustainable Resources for Engineered Material (SREMat; www.sremat.eu) research group, at KU Leuven, that consists of approx. 20 postgraduate researchers. SREMat is developing “sustainable processes for sustainable materials” and has built an expertise on the valorisation of residues towards cement and inorganic polymer (geopolymer) formulations, from the level of binder synthesis all the way to full-scale prototypes.

Yiannis believes there is room for improvement in many things, and AGILE seems to him that contributes in the right direction.