Marina Neophytou, a professor of environmental engineering and dean of the Faculty of Engineering, was elected rector of the University of Cyprus (UCY) on Wednesday, the university’s electoral committee announced. She is the first woman to hold the post.
Neophytou heads the Environmental Fluid Mechanics (EFM) Laboratory, an Isle of Excellence, according to the short biography published on the university’s website. She has been the elected dean of the Faculty of Engineering for 2023-2026.
She leads the university’s UCy-EFML team in three EU-funded projects. These are TRIGGER, on mitigating climate-induced health threats, and CiROCCO, on environmental observations across under-sampled deserts, both funded by Horizon Europe, and EnerCMed, on energy communities, climate resilience and protection from energy poverty, funded by Interreg Euro-MED.
With her research team, she studies how climate change and fluid dynamics affect citizens and society. She has given expert evidence in court cases involving environmental disputes and has coordinated investigations and consultations on environmental accidents and air quality cases for government and municipal authorities.
Leadership roles
Neophytou chaired the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering from 2021 to 2023. During her term, with the support of the department council, she launched Cyprus’s first undergraduate programme in environmental engineering, which began in 2025. This followed the recognition of environmental engineering as a separate engineering discipline by Cyprus’s professional engineering body.
She was director of the Faculty of Engineering’s interdepartmental master’s programme ‘Energy Technologies and Sustainable Design’ from 2018 to 2020, having been its founding director from 2012 to 2014. She was also deputy chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering from 2017 to 2019.
She joined UCY as a lecturer in 2005 and became an assistant professor in 2009, an associate professor in 2015 and a professor in 2020. She has since secured more than 3 million euros in external funding for the EFM Laboratory.
She was a visiting professor at ETH Zurich in 2014-2015. In 2019, she was a UNESCO visiting researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the United States, during research leave from UCY.
Education and early career
Neophytou studied engineering at the University of Cambridge, specialising in fluid mechanics and thermodynamics, and earned a BA (Hons) and an MEng between 1993 and 1997. Her studies were fully funded by a Cambridge Commonwealth Trust scholarship.
As an undergraduate she worked at the Schlumberger Cambridge Research Centre in Cambridge and at the Schlumberger-Dowell Research and Production Center in Paris. This work earned her the European ‘Women in Technology’ award.
She received an MA and a PhD in environmental fluid dynamics from Cambridge in 2002, with academic scholarships and financial support from the Schlumberger Cambridge Research Center. She then worked at Cambridge as a postdoctoral researcher from 2003 to 2005, funded by the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). Her research there involved designing and modelling a tracer-release experiment in London to study how air pollution disperses in cities.
International collaborations
Through a proposal funded by the Research Promotion Foundation, the EFM Laboratory led a collaboration with Cambridge and MIT to set up an initiative on sustainable built environments. After a successful bid to the Research and Innovation Foundation’s Hubs of Excellence programme, the initiative became the current Isle of Excellence ‘Urban Micro-Climate and the Design of Sustainable Built Environments’, which ETH Zurich has since joined.
Since 2011, Neophytou has co-organised a near-annual series of Urban Physics Schools with Professor J. Carmeliet of ETH Zurich and Professor B. Blocken of Eindhoven University of Technology.
The laboratory runs Erasmus exchanges with several European universities, including Cambridge, Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, the KTH Research School – University of Gävle in Sweden and the University of Genoa in Italy. It also runs a joint doctoral programme with Eindhoven University of Technology.
