Costas M Soukoulis received his BS in Physics from the University of Athens in 1974. He obtained his doctoral degree in Physics from the University of Chicago in 1978.

From 1978 to 1981 he was visiting Assistant Professor at the Physics Dept. at the University of Virginia. He spent 3 years at Exxon Research and Engineering Co., and since 1984 has been at Iowa State University (ISU) and Ames Laboratory. He has been an associated member of FORTH since 1983 and was a Professor (part time) at Dept. of Materials Science and Engineering at Univ. of Crete (2001-2011). He has courtesy appointments at the Departments of Materials Science and Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering at Iowa State University.

He has approximately 447 publications, more than 178 invited lectures at national and international conferences, and about 178 invited talks at institutions. He was the senior Editor (2002-2013) of the new Journal “Photonic Nanostructures: Fundamentals and Applications,” editor of Optics Letters (2008-2011), and he is a member of the editorial board of Physical Review Letters. Finally, a textbook, Wave Propagation: From Electrons to Photonic crystals and Left-handed Materials, was published by Princeton University Press 2008.

Soukoulis made the 2014-2016 list of Highly Cited Researchers published by Thomson-Reuters. Soukoulis is Fellow of the Society, the American Physical Society, and American Association for the Advancement of Science. He received the ISU Outstanding Achievement in Research, the senior Humboldt Research Award, shared the Descartes award for collaborative research on left-handed materials, was the first Frances M. Craig endowed chair in Physics at ISU, received an Honorary Doctorate from Vrije Universiteit in Brussels, Belgium, and has shared the 2013 James C. McGroddy Prize of APS for New Materials. He also won the 2015 Rolf Landauer Medal, ETOPIM International Association. He is the 2014 recipient of the Max Born Award.

Soukoulis and his collaborators at Ames Laboratory have achieved international recognition for their work on theoretical understanding and experimental realization of photonic bandgap (PBG) materials. Soukoulis has been instrumental in bringing forward the revolutionary fields of photonic crystals (PCs) and left-handed metamaterials (LHMs), extending the realm of electromagnetism (EM), and opening exciting new applications. In particular, Soukoulis and his colleagues were the first to demonstrate magnetic response and negative index of refraction at optical frequencies, which do not exist in natural materials. Soukoulis made important contributions to wave propagation in periodic and random media (electron and light localization, and random lasers).