George Kiriakidis (BSc, MSc, PhD, MBA), is a Physicist served as full Prof. at the Physics Department of the Univ. of Crete, Greece till 2017. He is the co-founder and first director of PCN Materials, a new start-up, spin-off the Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas (FORTH) producing novel visible light activated photocatalysts with strong depollution and biocidal attributes. In his career as a materials engineer, he founded and led the Transparent Conductive Materials (TCM) research group at FORTH for more than 30 years studying the electrical, optical structural and chemical properties of metal oxides for photovoltaic, sensing and photocatalytic applications. He was elected as vice-president and later as president of the European Materials Research Society (E-MRS) from 2013-2019 and served as Adjunct Prof. at the Univ. of West Virginia (USA) and Univ. of Huddersfield (UK).