Marianna Kontopoulou is Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. She studied Chemical Engineering at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece. In 1999 she completed her Ph.D. degree from the Department of Chemical Engineering at McMaster University in Canada with Prof. John Vlachopoulos. Her PhD work was on the experimental and theoretical study of the melting and densification phenomena in processes involving polymeric powders, such as rotational molding. Upon graduating she joined the faculty at Queen’s.

Her current research interests include polyolefin blends and composites, polymer nanocomposites, thermoplastic vulcanizates, thermoplastic elastomers and electrically conductive composites. She has also been involved in projects involving polymers and polymer rheology in biomedical applications and polymer joining processes. She is recognized for her contributions in material development for a wide-array of industrial processes, such as automotive applications, rotational molding, thermoplastic foaming, and film blowing. Her highly cited work on polymer nanocomposite blends has advanced knowledge on these complex multiphase systems, leading to new approaches for obtaining well-controlled structures with improved properties.

She is the author of more than 100 scientific publications, including peer-reviewed journal papers and conference proceedings. She has served as technical program committee chair, organizer and moderator for major international scientific conferences and has delivered invited lectures in academic and industrial settings. She is a member of the Polymer Processing Society (PPS), Society of Plastics Engineers (SPE), Society of Rheology (SoR), American Chemical Society (ACS) and the Canadian Societies of Chemical Engineering (CSChE) and Rheology (CSR).