Athanassios Z. Panagiotopoulos [1] is currently the Susan Dod Brown Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering [2] in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering of Princeton University.
Prof. Panagiotopoulos received his undergraduate degree from the National Technical University of Athens in 1982 and a PhD from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1986, both in Chemical Engineering. He was a postdoctoral fellow in physical chemistry at the University of Oxford (1986–87) and a faculty member at Cornell University (1987–97) and the Institute for Physical Science and Technology of the University of Maryland (1997-2000).
Research in the Panagiotopoulos group focuses on development and application of theoretical and computer simulation techniques for the study of properties of fluids and materials. Emphasis is on molecular-based models that explicitly represent the main interactions in a system. These models can be used to predict the behavior of materials at conditions inaccessible to experiment and to gain a fundamental understanding of the microscopic basis for observed macroscopic properties, utilizing large-scale numerical computations. The group emphasizes development of novel simulation algorithms for free energies and phase transitions. An example of such a methodology is Gibbs ensemble Monte Carlo, [3] which provides a direct way to obtain coexistence properties of fluids from a single simulation.
Prof. Panagiotopoulos is the author of more than 250 technical papers [4] and of the undergraduate textbook Essential Thermodynamics: An undergraduate textbook for chemical engineers [5] (2011).
He has received numerous awards and honors, including the AIChE Colburn Award, [6] [7] and the Prausnitz Award [8] in applied chemical thermodynamics. He was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 2004, [9] as a Fellow to both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences [10] and the American Association for the Advancement of Science [11] [12] in 2012, and as a Fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) in 2014. [13]