Pagona Papakonstantinou is Professor of Advanced Materials in the School of Engineering and a member of the Engineering Research Institute.  Pagona’s research interests concern the fabrication of nanocarbons as 2 Dimensional crystals and hierarchical multifunctional architectures, (such as graphene nanosheets, nanodots, nanoflakes, graphene oxide, dichalcogenides, hybrids, carbon nanotubes, nanotips, diamond nanorods) and the comprehensive investigation of their physical and physicochemical properties for use in renewable energy and biosensing areas. Underpinning research into graphene and 2D materials led to a series of patents and a license to 2-DTech/Versarien Ltd. She also has extensive experience of the nano-mechanical, gas barrier and corrosion protection properties of disordered carbon films (DLC).

Pagona is an Invited Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) through the ‘Leaders in the Field’ scheme for her contributions in the field of nanomaterials and nanoscience. She is a recipient of a Royal Academy of Engineering/Leverhulme Trust Senior Fellowship (2011) and of a Distinguished Research Fellowship from Ulster University (2003).  She has served/serves on various committees and panels such European Commission, EPSRC, Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin Light Source, Royal Irish Academy on Chemical and Physical Sciences; Institute of Physics in Ireland; National Access Programme (NAP) of Tyndall National Institute and UK Diamond Light Source.

Pagona was appointed to a Lectureship at Ulster in 1998 and promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2004 and a Personal Chair in 2009. Prior to this she undertook a number of post-doctoral positions including: magneto-optical material research at Queen’s University Belfast; fs direct laser micro-deposition at the Institute of Electronic Structure and Laser (IESL) in Crete and industrial research on Silicon on Insulator (SOI) technologies at Analogue Devices.

Prof Papakonstantinou Pagona has a BSc (Hons) degree in Physics from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece (1988) and a PhD in Physics from the Queen’s University of Belfast (1994).