Vayenas Constantinos

Chemical Sciences [Computational, theoretical and experimental chemistry]  (2010)

 He was born in Athens in 1950.
He studied Chemical Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens (NTU, 1968-1973). He received his PhD from the University of Rochester in NY, USA in 1976 and then taught as Assistant Professor at Yale University (1976-77) and as Assistant and Associate Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (ΜΙΤ, 1977-82). Since 1982 he is Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Patras. He has also been Visiting Professor at Yale, EPFL (Lausanne) and the University of Lyon. His research focuses in the areas of Catalysis, Electrochemistry and mathematical modeling of physicochemical and physical phenomena. He has coauthored some 260 refereed publications in International Journals, four of them in the Journals Science and Nature. He has received several international Awards which include the Outstanding Achievement Award of the High Temperature Materials Division of the Electrochemical Society (ECS) in 1996, the Wason Medal for Materials Research of the American Concrete Institute in 1992, the Chemistry Award of the Academy of Athens in 1992, and the Outstanding Faculty Award of the Chemical Engineering Department at MIT in 1979 and 1981.
Together with his coworkers at MIT and at the University of Patras he has discovered the phenomenon of the Non-Faradaic Electrochemical Modification of Catalytic Activity (NEMCA effect) which is also known in the literature as the phenomenon of the Electrochemical Promotion of Catalysis (EPOC). In recent years he is also investigating the thermodynamics and catalysis of hadronization and has developed Bohr-type rotating relativistic lepton models for hadrons and bosons using special relativity and gravity as the attractive force. These models contain no adjustable parameters and are in close agreement with experiment. In 2005 he was elected Fellow of the International Society of Electrochemistry (ISE), being chronologically the 14th scientist to receive this honour. He is Editor of the book series “Modern Aspects of Electrochemistry” and has coauthored three books published by Springer and Marcel Dekker. He has supervised 36 PhD Theses and 12 of these PhD students have become Professors in Greek but also non-Greek (USA, China) Universities and Research Centers. In 2010 he was elected as one of the 45 full members of the Academy of Athens and in 2015 he received an Honorary PhD degree from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.  In 2017 he became the first Greek to be elected as one of the 240 Foreign Members of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) of the USA.