July 17, 2026
Stylianos (Stelios) Varchanis has joined the MIT Chemical Engineering faculty as an assistant professor, effective July 1, 2026.
Varchanis develops theoretical and computational models to understand fundamental transport processes in complex fluids, soft matter, and living systems, with relevance to materials engineering, energy, and biotechnology. Applications include advanced materials manufacturing, enhanced oil recovery, porous media transport, and biomedical devices. His research integrates ideas from fluid and solid mechanics, rheology, soft matter physics, biophysics, dynamical systems, and computational mechanics, with a strong emphasis on multiscale modeling. His work is highly interdisciplinary, lying at the intersection of engineering, physics, biology, materials science, and applied mathematics.
Before joining MIT, Varchanis was a Flatiron Research Fellow at the Flatiron Institute of the Simons Foundation in New York, where he worked on active matter and intracellular mechanics. Previously, he was a postdoctoral scholar at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan, where he studied microscale flows of complex fluids in porous media. Varchanis received his PhD, MS, and BS in chemical engineering from the University of Patras, Greece, where his dissertation focused on elastic instabilities of polymeric fluids.