Yiannis N. Kaznessis, PhD, is the founder of General Probiotics, Inc. (1000 Westgate Dr., Suite 122, St. Paul, MN 55114-1964; Email:
Yiannis@gprobiotics.com; Phone: (651) 503-2696). He joined the company as Chief Executive Officer in 2017. He is an expert in synthetic probiotics and antimicrobial technologies. He received a diploma in chemical engineering at the Aristotle Univ. in Greece, and a PhD in chemical engineering at the Univ. of Notre Dame. He completed postdoctoral research at Pfizer Global R&D and at the Univ. of Michigan. In 2001, Kaznessis joined the Dept. of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the Univ. of Minnesota as an assistant professor. He was tenured and promoted to associate professor in 2007 and to full professor in 2011. He directed the Bioinformatics Summer Institute from 2004 to 2011 and served as Director of Graduate Studies from 2010 to 2017. Kaznessis mentored 15 PhD students, six MS students, and 12 postdoctoral fellows. He has authored more than 110 refereed papers and the textbook Statistical Thermodynamics and Stochastic Kinetics. He raised over $7 million in federal research funds and was the recipient of several honors including the Fulbright Award, the NSF CAREER Award, the 3M non-tenured Faculty Award, the IBM Young Faculty Award, the S.V. Sotirchos Award, the Thiele Lectureship at the Univ. of Notre Dame, the Charles E. Bowers Teaching Award at the College of Science and Engineering at the Univ. of Minnesota, and the AIChE CAST Outstanding Young Researcher Award.