STAFF
PROFILE

Assistant Professor

Dr. Maria Kalourkoti Rikkou

Short CV

Dr. Maria Kalourkoti holds a B.Sc. in Chemistry (Department of Chem-istry, University of Cyprus 2006) and a Ph.D. in Polymer Science (De-partment of Chemistry, University of Cyprus 2010). Subsequently, she served as post-doctoral research fellow at the Department of Chemistry of the University of Cyprus for four years. Dr. Kalourkoti is currently Lecturer in the Department of Pharmacy of the Frederick University, where she teaches General and Inorganic Chemistry, Analytical Chemistry, Organic chemistry I and II and Physi-cochemistry. Her research interests are focused on the organic syn-thesis of polymeric materials with different architectures such as lin-ear homopolymer and block copolymers, star polymers, micelles, membranes, hyperbranched polymers and polymer networks of well-defined materials employing different preparation methods, such as group transfer polymerization (GTP), atom transfer radical polymerization (ATRP), and reversible addition-fragmentation chain transfer polymerization (RAFT), characterization of the size, mor-phology and physicochemical properties of polymers via various techniques. She is also interested in the preparation of polymeric systems with the ability for microphase separation, leading to the formation of well-organized nanomorphologies in solution and in the solid state and the evaluation of polymeric materials to act as deliv-ery systems for drugs and biological molecules. She has been exten-sively involved in the organic synthesis of materials with emphasis on the preparation of polymers employing different preparation meth-ods, such as GTP, ATRP, RAFT and FRP. Furthermore, she gained ex-perience in polymer and material characterization by atomic force microscopy (AFM), small-angle neutron scattering (SANS), differen-tial scanning calorimetry (DSC), dynamic light scattering (DLS), static light scattering (SLS), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA), nuclear magnetic resonance