Constantinos (Costas) Vayenas received a Chemical Engineering Degree from the NTU Athens in 1973 and a PhD from the University of Rochester in 1976. He then taught as Assistant Professor at Yale (1976-77) and as Assistant and Associate Professor at MIT (1977-82) before returning to Greece as Professor at the University of Patras. He was then a Humboldt Fellow at the University of Karlsruhe (1990-91) and Visiting Professor at Yale (1991-92). His research interests focus on electrocatalysis, SOFC and PEM fuel cells, heterogeneous catalysis, metal-support interactions, promotion, and electrochemical promotion of catalytic reactions, but has also published on chemical cogeneration in fuel cells, concrete reinforcement, corrosion protection, proton tunneling and mathematical modeling of chemical and physical phenomena. He has more than 210 refereed publications, two books and holds 10 international patents. He is one of the Editors of Modern Aspects of Electrochemistry and has served as Guest Editor of Solid State Ionics. He has also served as Treasurer of the Solid State Ionics Society (SSI) and was Chairman of the Organizing Committee of the 12th International Conference of SSI in Halkidiki, Greece in 1999.

He has received several Awards, including the Dreyfous teacher-scholar award (1981), the Academy of Athens award in Chemistry (1992), the Wason Medal of the American Concrete Institute (1994), the Outstanding Achievement Award of the High Temperature Materials Division of the Electrochemical Society (1996) and was recently (2005) elected Fellow of the ISE.