To honour the memory of Prof. Dionysios (Dion) Dionysiou, we have introduced, along with the Chemical Engineering Journal (CEJ), the Dionysios D. Dionysiou Award for Yound Researchers to recognize the outstanding work of young scientists in the areas of water treatment technologies in which Prof. Dionysiou has pioneered novel advances.
A few words about Prof. Dion authored by Dr. Maria G. Antoniou:
Dionysios (Dion) Dionysiou, was a mentor, visionary, and a philanthropist that believed that safe drinking water should be readily available on a global scale irrespective of country of residence, financial, and societal status. Thus, he worked hard the past three decades in developing innovative advanced oxidation technologies for water purification and disinfection.
He was a dedicated researcher and scholar, advocate of professional service, a gifted lecturer, and a supporting mentor for his students and young faculty in the field of environmental sciences and engineering.
His research focused on the removal of both natural occurring and man made toxins from water resources.
He was known for setting long-term goals for himself and his students and vigorously pursuing them. He firmly believed that for each problem there was at least one solution and he would keep on persevering and pursuing his goals until they were met and the outcomes were attainable.
On a personal level, he was a loving and dedicated husband (32 years) and father, a great dancer of Greek dances, especially zeibekiko, a nature lover and photographer that loved to travel and experience new cultures and cuisines.
Prof. Dion was born in the island of Cyprus in a small village of Pafos District, Yiolou, on June 13, 1966. In his early childhood he lived in a farm in the district of Nicosia where he was helping his parents with the crops and animals. Following the war in 1974, his family moved to Yiolou, a small village in the district of Pafos. He enjoyed playing football, taking part in school plays, writing poetry and essays, going fishing and swimming.
He was an active member of the local YMCA participating in fund raisers to support the center. He also helped in the restaurant that his parents run, in the collection of grapes, and took care of a goat herd. Because of all the interaction with nature that he had as a child he formed a unique connection with it and an inherent desire to protect it. At the same time, he excelled in his studies and he received the highest entry mark at the National Technical University of Athens. Because of his academic excellence, he received a scholarship from the State Scholarship Foundation of Cyprus (IKY) to support his undergraduate studies.
He completed his Bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens in 1991, obtained a Master’s degree in Chemical Engineering at Tufts University in 1995, and a doctoral degree in Environmental Engineering from the University of Cincinnati in 2000. He was offered a tenured position immediately after the completion of his doctoral in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (which later on became the Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering) at the University of Cincinnati. He served at the University of Cincinnati (UC) for 23 years as a faculty member, a tutor, and mentor to countless students, faculty, and research scholars from around the world.
All these years he worked tirelessly towards expansion of global access to clean affordable drinking water. Dion’s research activities covered a wide range of topics including:
(i) advanced oxidation technologies for water treatment,
(ii) drinking water treatment and purification,
(iii) water quality, treatment, reuse, and monitoring,
(iv) sustainable water processes,
(v) physicochemical phenomena on particle-water interfaces,
(vi) transition-metal oxidation and reverse electron transfer reactions,
(vii) the use of ionic liquids in environmental applications,
(viii) destruction of biological toxins in water, and
(ix) environmental nanotechnology (fundamental, fate, transport, and applications of nanomaterials).
His motivation came from a unique curiosity to understand and the desire to address solutions to global environmental problems. He was fearless in developing new strategies for treatment of contaminants negatively impacting the environment and human health. He was a global leader for his unique approaches to provide sustainable solutions for the treatment of naturally occurring toxins and anthropogenic pollutants, from the detection and treatment of naturally occurring cyanotoxins to the remediation of perfluoroalkyl substances (also known as "forever chemicals").
In 2004 along with his doctoral student George Anipsitakis, they studied the use of chemical oxidation systems to generate sulfate radical species for the degradation of water contaminants as outlined in one of his landmark publications in Environmental Science and Technology titled Radical Generation by the Interaction of Transition Metals with Common Oxidants. The significance of this work is not only reflected by the high number of citations that exceed the 2800, but also it was selected to receive the 2021 AEESP Outstanding Publication Award.
A review on the visible light active titanium dioxide photocatalysts for environmental applications in Applied Catalysis B: Environmental in 2012 by an array of international co-authors it’s his most cited publication with more than 4200 citations. For nearly three decades Dion made tremendous contributions to understanding and application of Advanced oxidation processes for removal of emerging contaminants in water as summarized in his 2023 paper in Water Journal.
He was also granted a considerable number of funded projects from state, national and international organizations to address water and environmental challenges and unceasingly showcased the research that was conducted at the University of Cincinnati. His publication record exceeds 600 peer-reviewed journal articles, and was asked to give more than 600 talks in over 50 countries. Dion was a gifted lecturer, a wonderful mentor, and advocate for hundreds of students, postdoctoral fellows, faculty, and co-workers. It comes as no surprise that he was recognized as Highly Cited Researcher from the Web of Science (Clarivate Analytics) for the years 2018 until 2022 in the categories Engineering, Environment and Ecology, and Chemistry. Through his research activities, Dion managed to create an enormous academic family from students from around the globe with a lot of them following his footsteps in academia and maintaining professional and personal relationships with them.
His dedication to academia is unprecedented;
- he served on editorial boards, review panels,
- built international collaboration,
- served and lead large research teams,
- organized and coordinated symposia on around the world.
Dion also provided exemplary service to our field through his leadership roles in the ACS Division of Environmental Chemistry, where he worked to support early-career, female, and international faculty. He was an active member who served:
- on the Board of Directors (2014-2017),
- as Chief Technology Officer (2015-2017),
- on the AEESP Lecturers Committee (2023), and
- as the AEESP Liaison to the Environmental Chemistry Division of the American Chemical Society (ACS).
From 2013 up to 2017, he served as the UNESCO Co-Chair Professor on “Water Access and Sustainability”.
He was recognized by many awards including the:
- 2014 ARCADIS / AEESP Frontier in Research Award (now Walter J. Weber, Jr. AEESP Frontier in Research Award),
- 2017 AEESP Distinguished Service Award for serving on the Board of Directors and Chief Technology Officer, and
- 2021 Outstanding Publication Award.
- The most important award that he received (along with five of his students) was the 2022 Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water (PSIPW) - Creativity Prize for their work on developing advanced oxidation technologies and nanotechnologies to monitor and treat emerging toxins and other contaminants of emerging concern in water.
As his work on the treatment of forever chemicals, his memory as an academic, mentor, father, husband, and friend along with his contagious laughter will be forever remembered by all the people that he has touched around the globe.
- O'Shea, K.E., Antoniou, M.G. Dionysios (Dion) Demetriou Dionysiou (1966-2023). Nat Water 2, 104-105 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44221-024-00204-x
- Dr Maria G. Antoniou is an Associate Professor at the Department of Chemical Engineering of the Cyprus University of Technology (CUT)