Dimitrios Nikolopoulos named John W. Hancock Professor of Engineering
Dimitrios Nikolopoulos, who will return to the faculty of the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech later this summer, was named the John W. Hancock Professor of Engineering by the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors.
The John W. Hancock Professorship was established in 1988 by a gift from the alumnus, who earned his bachelor’s degree in mining engineering from Virginia Tech in 1925 and later founded the Roanoke Electric Steel Corp. Hancock had served on the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors, chaired the Virginia Tech Foundation board, and is the namesake of Hancock Hall on Virginia Tech’s Blacksburg campus. The professorship was created to attract and retain eminent scholars in the College of Engineering, and recipients hold the professorship for a period of five years.
Nikolopoulos will return to the Virginia Tech Department of Computer Science after spending the past 10 years in Europe, most recently as a professor of high performance and distributed computing and director of the Institute on Electronics, Communications, and Information Technology at Queen's University Belfast.
He brings to Virginia Tech a world-class record of scholarship, teaching, service, and outreach. His demonstrated ability as a leader, visionary, and strategic thinker, and builder of large research and academic units will be invaluable as Virginia Tech enters a time of significant growth and opportunity.
Through fundamental scholarship on computer systems, Nikolopoulos has made contributions to the global computing systems research community. He has published 55 peer-reviewed journal articles and 122 peer-reviewed papers in highly regarded archival conference proceedings. The total value of his research awards is $101.7 million and his own share of these awards is $38.9 million.
Nikolopoulos has advised or co-advised 22 Ph.D. students through completion and continues to advise six Ph.D. students. He has also advised 16 postdoctoral research fellows. He is a Distinguished Member of the Association for Computing Machinery and is a recipient of a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award, a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, a Department of Energy CAREER Award, and an IBM Faculty Award.
He received his bachelor’s degree, master’s degree, and Ph.D. from the University of Patras.
