Margarita Antoniou

Margarita was born and raised in Giannitsa, a small town in Greece. She holds a diploma in Civil Engineering of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, and is a graduate of the postgraduate program “Protection of the Environment and Sustainable Development”. In 2017, she enrolled in the postgraduate program “Computational Physics” of the same university, while she was working as a freelance civil engineer in a technical office in her hometown.

During her undergraduate studies she spent one semester in RWTH Aachen, with the Erasmus exchange program. This strengthened her intercultural communication skills and her understanding of how people from different cultures communicate, and perceive the world around them. She finds working together with colleagues from different academic and cultural backgrounds an ideal, creative and productive workplace.

Her research interests lie in the areas of optimizing complex engineering problems with the use of metaheuristic methods, investigating efficient methods and algorithms for worst-case and multi-level optimization, as well as in the area of Optimization Under Uncertainty.

Her postgraduate diploma thesis is entitled “Groundwater management optimization with combined use of Harmony Search Algorithm and modular finite-difference flow model Modflow”.  Based on this thesis, an article was presented at the 13th International Conference on Protection and Restoration of the Environment in Mykonos, in July 2016; an extended paper of the same topic is due to be published in the Desalination and Water Treatment Journal.

Her undergraduate diploma thesis focused on the optimization of drilling and pumping conditions of the water supply system of Giannitsa with the use of Genetic Algorithms. Upon graduation she had the opportunity to face the challenges of implementing theoretically suggested optimal solutions for real-world applications, as she was hired by the municipal water supply and sewerage service of Giannitsa for 8 months. This experience strengthened her intention to cope with engineering problems in both theoretical and practical ways.

The postgraduate program in Computational Physics enabled her to specialize and further develop her skills in modeling and simulating physical phenomena and mainly phenomena of engineering science.

She likes taking photos with point and shoot film cameras, listening to 80s music from vinyl records, watching silent movies and visiting museums when it is raining.

Currently she is a PhD student in Jožef Stefan Institute, on the UTOPIAE project.