Marina Neophytou has been elected as the new Rector of the University of Cyprus, bringing extensive academic and research experience in environmental engineering, fluid mechanics and sustainable development.
Neophytou is Professor of Environmental Engineering and heads the Environmental Fluid Mechanics (EFM) Laboratory at the University of Cyprus. She also served as Dean-elect of the School of Engineering for the 2023–2026 period.
Leading research on climate and the environment
Her research team examines how climate change and fluid dynamics affect citizens and society. She currently leads the UCy-EFML team in three European-funded projects: TRIGGER, which focuses on climate-induced health threats; EnerCMed, which addresses energy communities, climate resilience and energy poverty; and CiROCCO, which focuses on environmental observations in under-sampled desert regions.
She has also provided expert input in court cases involving environmental disputes and coordinated investigations and consultations on environmental accidents and air quality for government and municipal authorities.
Academic leadership at the University of Cyprus
Neophytou served as Head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering from 2021 to 2023. During her tenure, she led the creation of the University’s undergraduate Environmental Engineering programme, the first of its kind in Cyprus, which welcomed its first students in 2025.
She was also Director of the Interdepartmental Master’s Programme in Energy Technologies and Sustainable Design from 2018 to 2020 and its founding Director from 2012 to 2014. She previously served as Deputy Head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering from 2017 to 2019.
Neophytou was a Visiting Professor at ETH Zurich in 2014–2015 and a UNESCO Visiting Researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2019.
Cambridge studies and international research
She completed her undergraduate studies in Engineering at the University of Cambridge, specialising in fluid mechanics and thermodynamics, receiving BA Honours and MEng degrees between 1993 and 1997.
She later obtained MA and PhD degrees in Environmental Fluid Dynamics from Cambridge in 2002. Between 2003 and 2005, she continued her research there as a postdoctoral researcher, working on the design and modelling of a tracer-release experiment in London to study the dispersion of air pollution in an urban environment.
Neophytou joined the University of Cyprus as a Lecturer in 2005. She became Assistant Professor in 2009, Associate Professor in 2015 and Professor in 2020.
Since then, she has secured more than €3 million in external funding for the University’s Environmental Fluid Mechanics Laboratory.
Focus on sustainable built environments
Following funding from the Cyprus Research Promotion Foundation, Neophytou’s laboratory led a collaboration with the University of Cambridge and MIT to establish an initiative focused on sustainable built environments.
The initiative later developed into the University’s Urban Micro-Climate and the Design of Sustainable Built Environments Island of Excellence under the Research and Innovation Foundation’s Hubs of Excellence programme. ETH Zurich is now also part of the collaboration.
Since 2011, Neophytou has co-organised a regular series of Urban Physics summer and training schools with academics from ETH Zurich and Eindhoven University of Technology.
Her laboratory also runs Erasmus exchanges with several European universities, including Cambridge, Eindhoven University of Technology, KTH Research School–University of Gävle and the University of Genoa. It also currently runs a joint doctoral programme with Eindhoven University of Technology.
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