Patrina Paraskevopoulou is a Professor in Chemistry at the Chemistry Department of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA). She earned her B.Sc. in Chemistry, M.Sc. in Inorganic Chemistry and Technology and Ph.D. in Chemistry from NKUA. She was a postdoctoral fellow at NKUA and at the Missouri University of Science and Technology (MS&T), U.S.A. In 2016, she was awarded a fellowship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD Research Stays for University Academics and Scientists) and conducted research at the Hamburg University of Technology in Germany. She has over 20 years of experience in synthetic chemistry, catalysis, and electrochemistry. Since 2015 she has been working with inorganic and hybrid organic/inorganic nanostructured materials, such as metal-doped synthetic polymer, biopolymer and carbon aerogels, including novel polyurea-crosslinked biopolymer aerogels, and their use in environmental, food, and biomedical applications. In the last 15 years, she has been the PI or co-PI in several National and European Projects, and she served in the Core Management Committee of the COST Action AERoGELs, and as Working Group Leader in COST Innovation Grant ECO-AERoGELs. In 2023, she was recognized as a CAS REGISTRY Innovator by the American Chemical Society, and she also co-supervised the team of graduate and undergraduate students that won the 3rd prize in Ecotrophelia Greece 2023 for AiryBerry, an innovative aerogel-based food product. In 2025, she was a member of the team that won the 1st prize at the Hackathon Türkiye-Greece 2025. She has served as an expert evaluator for proposals in Marie-Curie and several national calls. She has served as Guest Editor in Polymers and Frontiers in Chemistry. She serves as a reviewer for more than 30 scientific journals. She has participated in the organizing and scientific committees of several national and international conferences. In 2022, she organized in Athens the 2nd International Conference on Aerogels for Biomedical and Environmental Applications.

As a 2025-2026 Fulbright Scholar, Prof. Paraskevopoulou will be hosted at the Department of Physics and Materials Science, The University of Memphis, TN. She will be studying biomedical applications of polyurea-crosslinked biopolymer (X-biopolymer) aerogels. X-biopolymer aerogels is a new class of materials introduced by Prof. Paraskevopoulou’s group in 2020. These nanostructured/nanoporous materials retain all desirable properties of their parent biopolymer aerogels (biocompatibility, biodegradability, low density, high surface area), while they are mechanically strong. Certain aliphatic X-biopolymer aerogels can degrade ex vivo within reasonable timeframes, and therefore they can be used as tissue regeneration scaffolds. Degradation rates can be tuned, via modification of the synthetic parameters. The overall objective of this project is to design and synthesize X-biopolymer aerogels with controllable degradation rates, aiming at advancing their potential for use in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.