Dr Athina Anastasaki
Athina was born and raised in Athens, Greece (with a very proud origin from Crete) and obtained her B.S. in Chemistry at the University of Athens. During her time as an undergraduate, she began research in polymer chemistry under the supervision of Prof. Marinos Pitsikalis, with whom she had her first publication. Thinking that publishing a paper was a good sign, she did her best to convince Prof. Dave Haddleton to accept her for a PhD position at the University of Warwick, in the UK. Despite the tremendous weather difference between Greece and UK (sunshine versus continuous rain), Athina very much enjoyed her stay at Warwick and graduated in late 2014 with the Jon Weaver Award for the best PhD in Polymer Chemistry in the UK. In early 2015, she accepted a Monash-Warwick research fellow position between the Pharmaceutical department at Monash University and the University of Warwick, jointly supervised by Professor Thomas Davis and Professor Dave Haddleton. She then received an Elings Fellowship, followed by a Global Marie Curie Fellowship, to conduct research with Professor Craig Hawker and return to the sun at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Athina will join the Materials department of ETH in January 2019 as an Assistant Professor and is excited to experience both snow and sun for the first time.