He was born in 1956 on the Greek island of Lesbos where he grew up. In 1979 he received his Diploma in Chemical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens and three years later he received his Ph.D in Chemical Engineering from the University of Houston, working under the supervision of Professor Neal Amundson. The topic of his dissertation was "Diffusion and Reaction in a Char Particle and in the Surrounding Gas Phase." In 1982 he became an assistant professor at the University of Rochester and by 1992 he was promoted to full professor. In 1998 he was also named professor in the Intradepartmental Program of Material Science of the University of Rochester. He thoroughly enjoyed teaching and the interaction with his undergraduate as well as graduate students and taught such courses as reaction engineering and reactor design, applied mathematics and numerical analysis, process control and dynamics, transport and reaction in porous media. In 1996 he was elected at the position of Research Director at ICE-HT and at the same time he represented Greece in international organizations (NATO, EU) and was a member of the Scientific Board of the institute

His research activities included a great variety of areas in chemical engineering such as reaction and process engineering in advanced materials processing, preparation methods of nanomaterials (e.g., nanocomposite films, nanoparticles, and carbon nanotubes), chemical vapor deposition, process design, modeling and simulation of transport and reaction systems, physical and chemical phenomena in porous media and nanostructured materials, optimization and design of porous media-based separation systems, process engineering of energy conversion and pollution control systems, applied mathematics in transport processes and reaction engineering.