Dimitris Papanikolaou is an architect and engineer whose research investigates the way in which the disciplines of computing and informatics shape architectural thinking, architectural space, and human communication. He is the founder and director of the Urban Synergetics Lab an interdisciplinary collaboration that develops enabling systems that connect humans through their built environment and investigates how humans interact cooperatively through these systems. He has been an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNCC), with a joint appointment between the School of Architecture and the Department of Software and Information Systems. Before UNCC, he worked at Microsoft Research and at the MIT Media Lab and he taught at NYU, MIT, and Harvard. Dr. Papanikolaou’s research has been presented and published in leading conferences, journals, and book chapters, and it has received distinctions including the Buckminster Fuller Challenge, the Harvard’s Deans’ Design Challenge, and the Knight Foundation Celebrate Charlotte Arts. He holds a Doctor of Design (DDes) from Harvard University Graduate School of Design, an MSc in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab, a SMArchS in Design Computation from MIT’s Department of Architecture, and a Diploma in Architectural Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens in Greece.