Dimitris Papanikolaou (DDes)

Dimitris Papanikolaou (DDes) is an architect, engineer, and urban technologist, with expertise in computational media and complex systems. His research interests expand to information and communication technologies, as applied in architecture, ecology, and human collaboration. His work combines analog and digital means to develop enabling systems that connect humans through their built environment. He is the founding director of Urban Synergetics Lab, an interdisciplinary lab bringing together the disciplines of Architecture, Computing, and Informatics, which conceives, designs, and develops enabling systems that connect humans, objects, and places while analyzing how humans interact cooperatively in these systems, through analytical and empirical methods. His work has been presented and published in leading conferences, journals, and book chapters, and it has received awards such as the Buckminster Fuller Challenge, Harvard’s Deans’ Design Challenge, and Knight Foundation’s Celebrate Charlotte Arts grant.

He is an Assistant Professor at the School of Architecture of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) and he has been an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNCC), with a joint appointment between the School of Architecture and the Department of Software and Information Systems. He has worked at Microsoft Research (MSR) at Redmond and the MIT Media Lab (Smart Cities and Changing Places groups), and he has also taught at the University of Patras, NYU, MIT, and Harvard University. Dimitris is currently an Associate Editor at the TAD (Technology | Architecture + Design) journal, published by Taylor & Francis, and has previously served as an Associate Editor at the IJAC (International Journal of Architectural Computing) journal. He holds a Doctor of Design (DDes) from Harvard Graduate School of Design, two MSc degrees in Media Arts and Sciences and Design Computation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and a Diploma in Architectural Engineering from NTUA.

Dimitris Papanikolaou is a participant of the Onassis AiR/ONX Fellowships program for 2024/25.