Dimitris Papanikolaou is an Assistant Professor at UNCC, jointly between the School of Architecture and the Department of Software and Information Systems. His research investigates how the study of system dynamics, social behavior, and information technology can inform new design strategies for intelligent urban, building, and mobility systems. His interests include human-building interaction, cooperative sharing, ubiquitous computing, data visualization, urban operations research, and design research. He has worked at Microsoft Research on applications of the internet of things and at the MIT Media Lab co-developing Mobility on Demand, an intelligent sharing system of electric foldable cars named by TIME magazine as the best automotive invention of 2007.
His research has received distinctions including the Buckminster Fuller Challenge; the Harvard Deans’ Design Challenge; the MIT Transportation showcase award in Economics, Finance, Policy and Land Use; the Harvard Fellowship on Energy and Environment; the Harvard Meyer Transportation Research award; and a Fulbright Fellowship. He has taught at NYU ITP, MIT, and Harvard and has been an invited speaker in universities, research labs, and design studios, such as University of Michigan, Dartmouth College, CMU, Microsoft Research, PennState, NOKIA Research, UC Berkeley, UN Studio, and OMA. Dr. Papanikolaou holds a Doctor of Design (DDes) from Harvard GSD, an MSc from MIT Media Lab, an SMArchS in Design Computation from MIT Architecture, and a Diploma in Architectural Engineering from NTUA.