The Carlton S. Wilder Junior Faculty Professorship has been awarded to Assistant Professor Kostas Konstantinidis in the School of Civil & Environmental Engineering. The Wilder Professorship was established as a bequest from the late Carlton S. Wilder to provide major a incentive to attract and retain tomorrow's leading scholars in environmental engineering. The Wilder Professorship is awarded to the most promising junior faculty members who have demonstrated excellence in teaching and research focusing on the study of water quality and other environmental media that impact water quality and quantity.
Dr. Kostas Konstantinidis joined the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology as an Assistant Professor in November, 2007. He also holds a courtesy appointment in the School of Biology and is program faculty in the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Genomics and in the Bioengineering Graduate Program. Dr. Konstantinidis earned his BS (1999) in Agriculture Sciences from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece and his PhD (2004) from the Center for Microbial Ecology at Michigan State University, where he was a Bouyoukos Fellow. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Dr. Konstantinidis’ education and research interests are at the interface of environmental microbiology with engineering, genomics and computational biology. The overarching goal of his research is to broaden our understanding of the genetic and metabolic diversity of the smallest organisms on the planet, the bacteria and archaea, and the role of this diversity for ecosystem function and resilience to natural as well as anthropogenic perturbations. He is also interested in the biotechnological applications of microbial diversity in the bioremediation of environmental pollutants and the assessment of water quality.
He has published more than 30 peer-reviewed articles and four book chapters in these research areas, which have received in excess of 1,600 citations (Google Scholar). Dr. Konstantinidis has received several national and international distinctions and awards for his work, including the 2010 International Skerman Award of the World Federation for Culture Collections (www.wfcc.info) and the 2012 Sigma Xi Young Faculty Research Award. He is a member of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM), the International Society for Microbial Ecology (ISME), the Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors (AEESP), and the editorial board of the journal of Applied and Environmental Microbiology.
More details about Dr. Konstantinidis' laboratory and research can be found at http://enve-omics.gatech.edu/