Dr. Constantinos Mavroidis

Wikipedia says

Constantinos Mavroidis, director of the Computational Bionanorobotics Laboratory at Northeastern University in Boston, is exploring an alternative approach to nanotech:
 
Rather than starting from scratch, the concepts in Mavroidis’s NIAC-funded study employ pre-existing, functional molecular “machines” that can be found in all living cells: DNA molecules, proteins, enzymes, etc. Shaped by evolution over millions of years, these biological molecules are already very adept at manipulating matter at the molecular scale — which is why a plant can combine air, water, and dirt and produce a juicy red strawberry, and a person’s body can convert last night’s potato dinner into today’s new red blood cells. The rearranging of atoms that makes these feats possible is performed by hundreds of specialized enzymes and proteins, and DNA stores the code for making them. Making use of these “pre-made” molecular machines — or using them as starting points for new designs — is a popular approach to Bionanotechnology. “Why reinvent the wheel?” Mavroidis says. “Nature has given us all this great, highly refined nanotechnology inside of living things, so why not use it — and try to learn something from it?”

Dr. Constantinos Mavroidis has been a Tenured Associate Professor of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at Northeastern University in Boston MA since January 2004. He is also a Visiting Scientist at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Shriners Hospital for Children in Boston, MA since October 2001 and he is behind the Bio-Nano Robotics web page which covers the works of the entire Nano Robotic community and has received funding from NASA Institute of Advanced Concepts (NIAC), National Science Foundation (NSF), and others.
 
Dinos has received numerous prestigious awards including Best Paper Award at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Design Technical Conferences (1994), the ASME Freudenstein/General Motors Young Investigators Award (1998), the Rutgers University Johnson and Johnson Discovery Award (1998), the National Science Foundation Early Career Award (2000), the 2005 Literati Club Awards for Excellence (Best Paper Award) for the journal Assembly Automation and the 2004 Best of What’s New Award in the Personal Health category from the magazine Popular Science for the invention “Smart Orthotic Device Using Electrorheological Fluids”.
 
He is coinventor of the “Prosthetic, Orthotic, and Other Rehabilitative Robotic Assistive Devices Actuated by Smart Materials” patent, the “Active Quick Connecting / Disconnecting Connector” patent and the pending “Electro-Rheological Fluid Brake and Actuator Devices” patent.
 
Dinos has authored and coauthored more than 120 journal and conference papers and book contributions. He is a Technical Editor of IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, Member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Computational and Theoretical Nanoscience and of the journal Nanobiotechnology. He was an Associate Editor of the ASME Journal of Mechanical Design, Chair of the US Federation for the Theory of Machines and Mechanisms, Chair of the Permanent Commission on Communications of IFToMM, Chair of the Robotics Technical Panel of the ASME Dynamics Systems and Control Division, and Chair of the IEEE Central Jersey/Princeton Chapter of the Robotics and Automation Society.
 
He was a Tenured Associate Professor at the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Rutgers University (2001–2004), an Assistant Professor at the same department (1996–2001), a member of the graduate program of the Rutgers Department of Biomedical Engineering (2000–2003), a faculty member of CAIP: The Rutgers Center for Advanced Information Processing (1998–2003) and Visiting Associate Professor of Surgery at Harvard University Medical School (2001–2003).
 
Dinos received his Diploma in Mechanical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece in 1988 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical Engineering / Robotics from the University of Paris VI, France, in 1989 and 1993 respectively. From 1993 to 1996 he was a Post-Doctoral Associate at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.