EEA is delighted to announce the appointment of Prof. Eleni Karagianni as the Academy's first holder of the Hephaestus Chair in Computational Materials Science. Prof. Karagianni joins EEA from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), where she has held a tenured Associate Professorship since 2019.
The Hephaestus Chair is one of four endowed faculty positions established at EEA's founding, funded by the Athens Engineering Trust. It carries with it a five-year research budget and a small dedicated computational research group.
Research focus
Prof. Karagianni's work sits at the intersection of computational mechanics and materials science. She is best known for her contributions to multi-scale modelling of cyclic fatigue in masonry — a research area with direct application to the conservation of historic Mediterranean structures. At EEA she will lead the institute's contribution to the Horizon Europe project STONEAGE, building a database of historic Mediterranean masonry behaviour under cyclic loading, in collaboration with the Laboratory for Mediterranean Built Heritage (LIMBH) under Dr. Petrakis.
She will also teach the second-year undergraduate course "Mechanics of Materials" in the Civil & Structural Engineering programme, beginning in winter semester 2026/27.
A diaspora return
Prof. Karagianni's appointment makes her the eleventh diaspora return academic to join EEA — a deliberate part of the Academy's faculty strategy. "We are not pretending that we can compete head-to-head with the world's best universities on every dimension," said founding rector Prof. Vlachos. "But we can offer talented Greek academics a serious institution, a real research budget, and the chance to build something. That is a proposition that an increasing number of senior people are finding more attractive than yet another year abroad."
Asked why she chose to come back, Prof. Karagianni said: "I had two reasons. The first is that I want my children to grow up in Greece. The second is more professional: STONEAGE is, intellectually, the most exciting project of my career so far, and EEA is the right place to host it. I am very glad to be here."