Dr. Elissaios Stavrou joined GTIIT in March 2021 as an Associate professor. He received his Ph.D. from the National Technical University of Athens in Greece, studying the structural response of functional glasses under variable thermodynamic conditions. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for solid state research (High Pressure group) and at the Geophysical Laboratory/Carnegie institution of Washington. In 2014 he joined Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as a staff scientist in the Materials Science Division. He was the Principal Investigator of programmatic and basic research projects and had received numerous awards for excellence in publication, for outstanding mentoring of undergraduate and graduate students and the Weapons and Complex Integration Gold Award. Very recently he received the prestigious Research and Development 100 (2020) award in the Process/Prototyping category for "Versatile Cold Spray". Dr. Stavrou has published over 70 peer-reviewed papers, including several in top journals: Science, Nature Chemistry and Communications, Physical Review Letters etc. He was invited to present his research at several conferences and colloquia, including the high-pressure Gordon Research Conference and the APS March meeting.