The University of Houston's Cullen College of Engineering is proud to welcome Dr. Triantafillos "Lakis" J. Mountziaris as the new department chair for the William A. Brookshire Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.
Mountziaris will start at the university on Jan. 1. Mountziaris joins UH after spending the previous year at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst as a professor. Previous to that, he served for four years as Process Systems, Reaction Engineering and Molecular Therodynamics Program Director at the National Science Foundation. For eight years, from June 2007 through November 2015, Mountziaris was the director of the UMass NanoMedicine Institute, a multi-campus research center.
Dr. Joseph W. Tedesco, Elizabeth D. Rockwell Dean of the UH Cullen College of Engineering, highlighted the impressive academic and research credentials Mountziaris has.
“Dr. Mountziaris brings a wealth of experience and knowledge to our college,” Tedesco said. “I expect great things from his forthcoming leadership of the William A. Brookshire Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, including the expansion of our research enterprise, the growth of our graduate programs, and much more. His expertise in research and academia makes him an ideal candidate for the continued leadership of one of our top performing departments.”
Mountziaris has more than 30 years of experience as a professor between UMass-Amherst and the State University of New York at Buffalo. He has also overseen and supported 24 doctoral advisees, and received authorship credit for more than 80 research papers. He has also edited two books and received three U.S. patents for his research work. He has received grants totaling more than $18 million for his research work.
In addition to his experience as a professor and researcher, has been honored by a variety of organizations for his work. Most recently, he served as the chairman in 2018 and 2019 of the Congressional Review Committee that evaluated the status of the U.S. Department of Energy's Solid Oxide Fuel Cell Program. Mountziaris has been a guest lecturer for a variety of higher learning institutions and prestigious organizations – Princeton, the Institute of Chemical Engineering Sciences in Greece, Northeastern University, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, and at the Ninth World Congress of Chemical Engineering in South Korea, to name a few.
Mountziaris is a fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. He is also a member of the American Chemical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Society for Engineering Education, the Electrochemical Society and the Materials Research Society.
Mountziaris earned his doctorate in Chemical Engineering from Princeton University in 1989. He received his M.A. in Chemical Engineering from Princeton in 1983, and his undergraduate diploma in 1982 from Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, Greece. From 1987 to 1989, he served as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.