Athanasia Athanassiou is Principal Investigator of the Smart Materials Group and Associate Director for the Nanomaterials Domain at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia. She has a degree in Physics from the University of Ioannina in Greece, an MSc from the University of Manchester, and a Ph.D. in Physics from Salford University in UK. She joint IIT in 2011 and nowadays her group of Smart Materials counts around 50 people that work on sustainable materials and technologies for the benefit of environmental and human health. She has published more than 400 articles in scientific journals, various chapters in scientific books, and has acted as scientific editor. She has 26 Italian and international patents.