Biography

Sotirios is a multidisciplinary researcher with 2 MSc degrees, one in Spatial Analysis and Environmental Management from the University of Thessaly, Greece, and one in Water Science and Management from Utrecht University, The Netherlands.
Currently he is working as a researcher at KWR Water Research Institute in the department of Water Quality and Health. There, aside from working on projects related to drinking water quality, safety, and risk assessment, he is also conducting his PhD at TU Delft, working on the EU PathoCERT project under the supervision of Prof. Gertjan Medema and Prof. Jan Peter van deer Hoek. The project has an overall objective of strengthening the coordination capability of first responders in handling waterborne pathogen contamination events. The outcome of the project is a set of practical technologies, tools, and guidelines on how first responders should react to enhance the resilience of European cities to waterborne threats and challenges.
His research focuses on:

1. Research and development of an AI-based tool that extracts information on waterborne pathogens from scientific publications, for the facilitation of impact assessment and control options during a pathogen contamination event.
2. Microbial contamination modeling in a drinking water network after a pathogen contamination event taking into account the hydraulic uncertainties of a network and more complex interactions of chlorine with reactants. Specificaly focusing on creating a benchmark using the open-source software EPANET-MATLAB Toolkit, under various scenarios, for a realistic representation of source identification, exposure and risk assessment, as well as mitigation options.

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