Ioannis Katsoyiannis (born 4 December 1974) is a Greek environmental chemist, currently associate professor at the department of chemistry at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He has earned a reputation among aquatic chemists because of his studies on the development of novel technologies for arsenic removal from groundwaters, especially the investigation and development of biological arsenic removal. He was born in Thessaloniki, in Greece and comes from his father's side (Anastasios Katsoyiannis) from the village of Spileon in Grevena and from his mother's side (Mersini Kouimtzi) from Chalastra, a suburb of Thessaloniki mostly known for biggest rice production in Greece and the mussel cultivation and production. His paternal grandfather, Ioannis Katsoyiannis, was one of the founders and the first secretary of the historic football team of Grevena, Pyrsos Grevena, which was founded in 1927! His brother Athanasios Katsoyiannis, also a chemist, is a permanent staff member of the European Commission, working in the joint research center of the European Commission in Ispra, in North Italy. Ioannis is married to the chemist Dr. Athanasia Tolkou.
Studies
He undertook his primary schooling at the Mantoulidis primary school and attended the 1st gymnasium and lyceum of Thessaloniki for his high school and lyceum studies. In 1992 he entered the Department of Chemistry of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, from which he graduated in 1997. In 1998 he finished his Master of Science studies at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh (Scotland) in Environmental Pollution Control Management. Following, he did his PhD at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki under the supervision of Prof. Zouboulis, on the subject of arsenic removal from groundwaters. During his PhD studies, he obtained a 3 year scholarship from the Greek State Scholarship Foundation (I.K.Y). He also visited the Technical University of Berlin twice, with a short term research fellowship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and worked in Berlin at the research site Marienfelde of Umweltbundesamt. For his PhD studies, in 2006 he received together with Professor Zouboulis the Award of Chemistry from Empirikion Foundation in Athens. In 2003 he served the Greek army and upon dismissal, he obtained a fellowship from the highly prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Stifftung to conduct post doctoral research at the Technical University of Berlin in the group of Professor Martin Jekel, in the field of aquatic chemistry of uranium and its removal from groundwaters.
Professional career
In 2006 he earned a Marie Curie Individual Intra European fellowship to perform research at the water research institute (Eawag) of ETH Zürich in the group of Dr. Stephan Hug. In 2008, he continued at the same Institute, in the group of Professor Urs von Gunten, participating in the TECHNEAU project, which aimed at developing technologies for universal access to safe water. From 2009 to 2014 he worked as supervisor engineer for the giant engineering companies Alstom Power and Hitachi Power Europe, in the commissioning of some of the bigger thermal power plants of Europe, such as the almost 2 GW plant in Pembrokeshire in UK, the totally innovative combined cycle power plant in Modugno in South Italy, the Moorburg thermal power plant in Germany, near Hamburg and the power plant at Maasbracht, in Holland.
He left the industrial field, to join the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, firstly as lecturer and currently as associate professor for environmental Technology. In 2015 he obtained an individual research fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation to conduct research in the group of Professor Urs von Gunten at EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) in Switzerland. In the years 2020-2022 he was included in the top 2% of world scientists in the field of Environmental Chemistry published in PLOS Biology and based on citations from SCOPUS. In 2022, Professor Katsoyiannis was appointed director of the Institute of Sustainable Water Management and Water Law of the European Public Law Organization and he will be an academic visitor at the University of Ca Foscari in Venezia for the academic year 2023-2024.