Triantafyllos Stylianopoulos

Biography

Diploma in Chemical Engineering, 2003 National Technical University of Athens, Greece PhD in Chemical Engineering, 2008 University of Minnesota, USA Postdoctoral training, Department of Radiation Oncology Massachusetts General Hospital / Harvard Medical School, USA Triantafyllos received a Diploma in Chemical Engineering from National Technical University of Athens, Greece (GPA: 9.34/10) in 2003. The same year he joined the Chemical Engineering graduate program at the University of Minnesota, USA to pursue his doctoral studies. He worked with Professor Victor Barocas on modeling the mechanical response of native and bioartificial tissues. During his doctoral studies, he was elected twice top doctoral student of the department. After the completion of his PhD., in May 2008, Triantafyllos worked as a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Rakesh Jain's lab in the department of Radiation Oncology at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, USA. In Dr. Jain's lab he performed research in a mixture of experimental and computational problems for optimizing the delivery of nanomedicine to solid tumors. In September 2010, he joined the faculty of the Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering department at the University of Cyprus. Triantafyllos has co-authored over 60 publications published or accepted for publication in peer-review journals. His publication record includes four articles in Nature journals (Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Medicine, Nature Communications and Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology), six in PNAS, and two in Cancer Research. h-index:24, > 3000 hetero-citations. He has received a highly selective research grant by the European Research Council in 2013 as well as the prestigious Y. C. Fung Young Investigator award by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 2016 (https://www.asme.org/about-asme/participate/honors-awards/achievement-awards/y-c-fung-young-investigator-award). Triantafyllos was also the recipient of the 2014 Most Cited Paper Award by the Biomedical Enigneering Society (BMES) of the USA in 2014 and the New Researcher Award by the Research Promotion Foundation of Cyprus the same year. Triantafyllos is a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the Biomedical Engineering Society of the USA, the European Foundation of Clinical Nanomedicine, the European Society of Biomechanics and the Greek Association of Computational Mechanics.

Research Interest

The major focus of the current research is on the mechanics (solid and fluid) and drug delivery of solid tumors. I study the evolution of fluid and solid stresses in tumors and how these stresses correlate to tumors' patho-physiology. Furthermore, I investigate strategies to improve delivery of chemo- and nano-therapeutics to tumors by either modifying the tumor microenvironment or developing rules for the optimal design of therapeutic agents. Areas of interest include 1) development of therapeutic strategies to re-engineer solid tumors in order to improve therapy; 2) mathematical modeling of the fluid and solid mechanics of cancer; 3) investigation of specific genes that are related to cancer metastasis in relation to tumor stiffness; and 4) response of stromal cells to mechanical stimuli.