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Curriculum Vitae

HERMIS IATROU

             Personal Information:

Birthdate:  March 28, 1968

City:   Athens Greece

Address:   University of Athens, Department of Chemistry, Athens, 15771, Greece.

Current Position: Professor

Phone number: +30 210 7274768

Marital status:  Married with three children

Personal Web Page:  http://users.uoa.gr/~iatrou/index.html/web/

E-mail:   iatrou@chem.uoa.gr


I have 130 publications in refereed journals and book chapters, h=47, 10000 citations as of January 2018.


             Education and Career Milestones:

1985-1989: Bachelor of Science in Chemistry, University of Athens.

1989-1993: Doctor of Philosophy in Polymer Science, University of Athens, under the supervision of Prof. Nikos Hadjichristidis.

1992: September 1992, visiting student in National Research Council of Canada, Ottawa, Canada, under the supervision of Dr. Jacques Roovers.

1994-1995: January 1994-May 1995 Marie-Curie Post-Doctoral Fellow in Small Angle Neutron Scattering of labelled polymers, Institute of Forschungszentrum Juelich, Germany, under the supervision of Prof. Dieter Richter.

1995-1997: Director of the Chemistry Lab for the Quality Control of fuels, in NATO installation of Petroleum Distribution Command Larissa, Greece. Military Service in the Greek Army, final degree: Second Lieutenant.

1997-1998:  Post-Doctoral Fellow, University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA, under the supervision of Prof. Jimmy Mays.

1998-2002: From March 1998-April 2002, Post-Doctoral Fellow, University of Athens, under the supervision of Prof. Nikos Hadjichristidis.

2002- 2006: Assistant Professor, University of Athens, Chemistry Department.

2006: August 2006, visiting Professor, University of Tennessee at Knoxville, USA.

2006-2009: Permanent Assistant Professor, University of Athens, Chemistry Department.

2009-: July 2009, Associate Professor, University of Athens, Chemistry Department.

2010-: Director of the Graduate Program of the University of Athens Chemistry Department, entitled “Polymer Science and its Applications”

2011-2013: Head of Section II of Chemistry Department.

2014-: Director of the Industrial Chemistry Laboratory of the Chemistry Department of the University of Athens.

2015: Professor, University of Athens, Chemistry Department.


             Honors-Awards:

1. Post-Doc Fellow of a Marie-Curie Fellowship, Forschungszentrum Juelich GmbH, 1994-1995.

2. Post-Doc Fellow, 1997, University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA.

3. Member of the Directory Board of the Hellenic Polymer Society.

4. Founding Member of the Hellenic Society of Nanotechnology on Health Sciences

5. Associate Editor of Journal of Materials

6. Executive Editor for ‘International Journal of Nanomaterials, Nanotechnology and Nanomedicine’

7. Editor-in-Chief for Peertechz Journal of Medicinal Chemistry and Research’.

8. Nomination as “One of the top Greek Scientist worldwide among the most Influential Scientists of the International Bibliography.” on 2016 (http://www.uoa.gr/anakoinoseis-kai-ekdhloseis/anakoinoseis/proboli-anakoinwshs/shmantiki-h-symmetoxi-twn-ka8hghton-toy-ekpa-ston-pinaka-ellinwn-episthmonwn-me-megalh-epirroi-sthn-episthmoniki-bibliografia.html and http://www.tovima.gr/society/article/?aid=812879 ).


             Research Interests:

High vacuum techniques, Static and Dynamic Low angle laser light scattering, Size exclusion chromatography with multiple detectors, FTIR spectroscopy, UV-VIS spectroscopy, NMR spectroscopy, Small-angle neutron scattering, Differential scanning calorimetry, Dynamic mechanical analysis, Circular dichroism, Ultracentrifuge, membrane and vapor pressure chromatography.


             Teaching experience:

Director of the Graduate Program of the University of Athens Chemistry Department, entitled “Polymer Science and its Applications” since August 2010. In this program, graduate students can apply for Master’s (18 months) and Ph.D. (3 years) degrees. Through this program, I will be able to select the best Master’s/PhD candidates for the project.  


             Undergraduate Courses:

Polymer Science

Special Topics in Polymer Chemistry

Industrial Chemistry

Polymer Science Laboratory courses

Graduate Courses:

Synthetic Methods of Polymers

Characterization Methods of Polymers

Synthesis of Polymers with Well-Defined Architecture

Polymer Science Laboratory courses



             


Recent Organization of Conferences Patents

Scientific Leadership Profile

Since obtaining my Ph. D. degree, I have devoted my research efforts to the synthesis of model macromolecules, with high degrees of structural complexity along with molecular and compositional homogeneity. The synthetic efforts led to the synthesis of a new class of polymeric materials the “miktoarm” stars, through a new synthetic approach (Iatrou et al. J. Polym Sci A: Polym Chem, 2000, 38, 3211) opening avenues to the synthesis of materials with multifunctional properties in bulk and in solution. The new synthetic approach was further extended and led to the synthesis of model compounds with complex macromolecular architecture, such as cyclics, grafts, combs and interconnected stars. In addition, this new synthetic technique, led to the synthesis of multiarmed stars with up to 128 arms, having unique properties. In 2004 I resolved a 50-year old synthetic challenge, where model polypeptides were synthesized by using N-carboxy anhydrides (NCAs) and primary amines as the initiator. Polypeptides self-assemble hierarchically from a few angstroms (α-helix, β-sheet) up to microns. The synthesis of model compounds with complex macromolecular architecture gave me the opportunity to investigate the relationship between the macromolecular structure and properties of polymeric materials. Since August 2010, I have been the Director of the Graduate Program of the University of Athens Chemistry Department, entitled “Polymer Science and its Applications”, and since 2015 I am the Director of the Industrial Lab of the University of Athens. I have 115 publications in refereed journals and books, h=44, 8800 citations, as of November 2016, according to Google Scholar.

Upon joining the Polymer Group of the University of Athens Chemistry Department, I developed a new synthetic strategy using the high vacuum techniques (HVT) as a way to synthesize model compounds, i.e. polymers exhibiting low polydispersity indices and controlled molecular characteristics. Using this new synthetic strategy, a new class of polymeric materials was synthesized, in which chemically different polymeric chains emanated from the same central point, the so called “miktoarm stars”. I took this subject far beyond the state of the art, by synthesizing a variety of miktoarm stars with different macromolecular architectures, such as dendrimers, cyclics, grafts and combs. The importance of this subject awarded me with two post-doctoral fellowships to the synthesis of miktoarm stars and the identification of their properties. The impact of this new class of polymeric materials on the self-assembly of copolymers, in bulk and in solution, was very high. Miktoarm star copolymers thus shift the borders of the classic morphology map and formed new morphological structures (Iatrou et al. Chemical Reviews 2001, 101, 3747). The influence of the macromolecular architecture on the self-organization of block copolymers composed of incompatible polymeric blocks connected with a chemical bond, led to the formation of the double gyroid and inverse double gyroid morphology, which is difficult to obtain with simple diblock copolymers. The polymers synthesized led to the formation of three-dimensional ceramic films. The importance of our work was demonstrated by its publication in Science in 1999. The wide variety of monomers used for the synthesis of miktoarm stars was enriched by the determination of the experimental conditions for the synthesis of well-defined poly(dimethylsiloxane) copolymers by my group. The synthesis of poly(dimethylsiloxane) linear and star polymers was achieved by using these experimental conditions, never obtained before (Iatrou et al. Macromolecules, 2000, 33, 6993).

In addition to miktoarm stars, I have also synthesized regular stars with up to 128 arms. The significance of these stars was emphasized by the large number of publications from my group and other scientists following my original methodology, as well as the large number of citations of the original 1993 paper.  The properties of the multiarm stars have proven very interesting, since the large number of arms induces osmotic compressibility, preventing the arms from interpenetrating, thus causing the stars to behave like hard spheres and form glassy structures, even in solution which defines their rheological properties. This behavior leaded to the synthesis of materials with tunable rheological properties and was published in Nature Materials (Iatrou et al. Nature Materials 2008, Volume 7, 780). The model materials synthesized by anionic polymerization and my synthetic strategy were exploited for the elucidation of the dependence between the properties and the macromolecular architecture (Iatrou et al. Macromolecules, 2000, 33, 8328.)

My main intention is to use my expertise for the synthesis of biocompatible polymers that would be able to self-assemble down to the order of magnitude of a few angstroms. This would allow for the formation of functional aggregates with defined molecular characteristics, for biomedical applications such as drug and gene delivery. For that purpose, I had to shift to the synthesis of more functional materials like polypeptides that form 3D structures, such as α-helix and β-sheets, as do natural proteins. In 2004, after two years synthetic efforts, I defined the conditions for the living ring opening polymerization of N-carboxy anhydrides (NCAs), i.e. the monomers for the synthesis of polypeptides, with primary amines as the initiators, a 50 year-old synthetic challenge (Iatrou et al. Biomacromolecules 2004, 5, 1653). Although other methodologies had been presented for the synthesis of well-defined polypeptides with other initiators, the original problem of using primary amines had not been resolved. Since then, my group has managed to synthesize a wide variety of novel block copolypeptides of different amino acids, as well as macromolecular architectures (multiblocks, stars: Iatrou et al. J. Polym. Science 2005, 43, 4670). The advantages of this synthetic approach over other procedures were presented in a recent publication in Chemical Reviews (Iatrou et al. Chemical Reviews 2009, 109, 5528). I combined my accumulated synthetic expertise in the synthesis of conventional polymeric materials with the polypeptides, resulting in multifunctional hybrid biomaterials with complex macromolecular architectures (Iatrou et al. Reactive & functional polymers 2009, 69, 435, and Iatrou et al.  Biomacromolecules 2008, 9, 2072 ).The properties of the functional polypeptides were determined, where it was found that the current picture of the rod-like α-helical molecule such as poly(γ-benzyl-L-glutamate) (PBLG) is not that of an infinitely long tube, but rather of a broken tube (Iatrou et al. Biomacromolecules 2005, 6, 2352). A wide variety of α-amino acids was used to synthesize different polypeptides, each one having different properties, such as poly(γ-benzyl-L-glutamate), poly(L-lysine), poly(L-glycine), poly(L-alanine), poly(L-tyrosine), poly(L-leucine), and more recently poly(L-proline). The synthesis of well-defined poly(L-proline) containing polypeptides was plagued for most initiating compounds, due to the lack of the hydrogen at the nitrogen of this amino acid. I showed that our approach invented in 2004 is more advanced and more general that those presented so far, since it can polymerize all α-amino acid N-carboxy anhydrides, including L-proline NCA. The difficulty of the synthesis of polymers of L-proline is obvious since only very old papers referred to poly(L-proline), when characterization was limited to IR spectroscopy and viscosity measurements (Iatrou et al. Biomacromolecules 2011, 12, 2396).

In order to enter the area of possible drug and gene delivery applications, I synthesized a series of amphiphilic triblock copolymers of the ABA type, where the A blocks were hydrophilic poly(L-lysine) (PLL) and the middle block was α-helical hydrophobic partially deuterated PBLG. These ABA copolymers were of interest since the architecture and the stiffness of the chains selected led to the formation of vesicular structures in any composition of the two blocks. Moreover, we made polyion complexes by mixing the polymers with pDNA, and found that PBLG dominates the aggregation and forms vesicular structures (Iatrou et al. Biomacromolecules 2007, 8, 2173). The triblock polypeptides that were synthesized by my group, were mixed with DNA bases, to afford fibrillar constructs from multilevel hierarchical self-assembly of discotic and calamitic supramolecular motifs, through self-organization up to six length scales, from a few angstroms up to microns (Iatrou et al. Advanced Functional Materials 2008, 18, 2041). The influence of the macromolecular architecture of polypeptidic materials was exploited by mixing the same DNA base with diblock copolypeptide with similar molecular characteristics to the triblocks. In this case, a supramolecular framework material was formed (Angewandte Chemie International Edition 2011, 50, 2516).

The synthesis of model polypeptidic compounds and the elucidation of their properties, led to the conclusion that their stronger advantage over the conventional polymers is their ability to form 3D structures such as α-helix and β-sheet (secondary structure).  It was found that the secondary structure of polypeptides results in better protection of the genes and of encapsulated drugs, preservation of the structure of DNA over different conditions within the human body, easier formation of vesicular structures through self-assembly, and control of the hierarchical self-assembly of polypeptidic polymers from a few angstroms up to micron length scales, like the natural proteins. All these properties render polypeptides ideal materials to mimic natural proteins in order to form “smart” aggregates for bio-inspired applications.

After gaining this experience in synthesizing multifunctional amphiphilic hybrid materials with a variety of macromolecular architectures that can define their self-assembly, the next step in my career will be to use this expertise to produce multifunctional polymeric materials able to encapsulate drugs and genes in a cell delivery system. These materials, will combine the advantages of conventional polymers and of the complex macromolecular architecture for the control of aggregation, and of polypeptides for the formation of hierarchical aggregation in many length scales, in order to present an inherent property that will guide their self-assembly to the formation of “smart” nanoconstructs. These nanoconstructs will be able to bypass all the intra- and extracellular obstacles and efficiently and selectively deliver drugs and genes to subcellular targets, in order to treat lethal cancers and cardiovascular diseases.

Since 2001, I have supervised 24 Master’s theses, 8 Ph. D. theses and 2 Post-doc fellows. I am currently supervising 2 Ph. D. theses along with 6 Master’s theses, all related to the synthesis of well-defined amphiphilic copolymers containing polypeptides. Several of my students have been hired in the R&D departments of pharmaceutical and chemical companies in Greece, while others are continuing with post-docs in order to follow academic careers. Since 2002, I have participated in 22 European and Greek research projects either as Principal Investigator or Senior Researcher. I have also participated in more than 60 International and Greek conferences, ten of which were invited talks. I was on the organizing committee of 5 Symposia, where I co-organized two international conferences.



             List of Research projects that have participated, since 2001





2015, “ADVANCED DRUG DELIVERY SYSTEMS IN NANOMEDICINE WORKSHOP”




GREEK PATENT: Pentablock Polypeptidic and Hybrid Polymers to gige In Situ-Forming Injectable, Self-Healing pH- and Temperature-Responsive Hydrogels for Localized Targeted Delivery of Gemcitabine.

Greek Patent No: 1009114 and INT CL: A61K 47/34, C08G 69/36.