Marina Neophytou

Biography

Dr Marina Neophytou is an Associate Professor at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Head of the Environmental Fluid Mechanics (EFM) Laboratory Group. She served as the first Director of the Interdepartmental Graduate Program "Energy Technologies and Sustainable Design" of the School of Engineering of the University of Cyprus (2012-14). During 2014-15, she has been a Visiting Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology - ETH-Zurich (jointly at the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering and the Department of Architecture - Chair of Building Physics) as well as a UNESCO Visiting Research Fellow during 2009 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, U.S. (Department of Urban Studies and Planning) and Los Alamos National Laboratory, U.S. (Systems Engineering Division), as part of sabbatical leaves from the University of Cyprus. She completed her undergraduate studies (BA-Honours and MEng degrees) at Cambridge University (UK) at the Department of Engineering (Fluid Mechanics & Thermodynamics Division) on a full-expense Cambridge Commonwealth Trust Scholarship (1993-97). During her undergraduate studies she has worked at the Schlumberger Cambridge Research Centre (Cambridge, UK) and Schlumberger-Dowell Research and Production Center (Paris, France) for which she has received the European Grant Award "Women in Technology". She has received her MA and PhD degrees (2002) in the area of Environmental Fluid Dynamics from Cambridge University (UK) on academic and industrial scholarships, while during 2003-2005, she continued at Cambridge University as a post-doctoral research associate under an EPSRC (UK) grant to design and model a tracer release experiment in London for urban air pollution dispersion studies. She joined the University of Cyprus as Lecturer in 2005 (as an Assistant Professor in 2009 and as an Associate Professor in 2015), and since then, she has attracted more than a million euros of external funding to the EFM lab. Following an approved proposal funded by the Cyprus Research Promotion Foundation, the EFM lab is leading a partnership with Cambridge University (UK) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) on a Sustainable Built Environment Initiative. Since 2011, she has been jointly co-organising, together with Prof. J. Carmeliet (on behalf of ETH-Zurich) and Prof. B. Blocken (on behalf of Eindhoven University of Technology) an almost annual series of Urban Physics Schools; the last Urban Physics Spring School was hosted in Cyprus in May 2016, while the upcoming Urban Physics Autumn School 2017 will be hosted in Nikiti-Greece from 22nd to 28th October 2017. The EFM lab has initiated and currently actively undertakes ERASMUS exchange visits with a number of universities in Europe including the University of Cambridge (UK), Eindhoven University of Technology (The Netherlands), KTH Research School-University of Gaevle (Sweden) and the University of Genoa (Italy). It also currently runs a joint PhD program with the Eindhoven University of Technology. Her recent collaborative work "Toward designing strategies for Urban Heat Island mitigation based on mutli-scale flow considerations"* has been awarded the Best Paper Award in the 34th International AIVC Conference: Energy conservation technologies for mitigation and adaptation in the built environment: the role of ventilation strategies and smart materials (2013).

Research Interest

• Experimental Environmental Fluid Dynamics (laboratory and field measurements) • Urban air pollution dispersion modeling • Urban Heat Island studies and modelling Model performace evaluation • Thermofluid Dynamics of the Urban Environment (Mass and Heat Transfer) • Buoyancy-driven flows in industrial and environmental applications • Model performace evaluation • Modelling of Chemically-Reacting turbulent flows