Stelios Aspiotis Succesfully Defends PhD Dissertation

1 March 2023

Photo: CSMC

Stelios Aspiotis has passed his viva voce examination, thus completing his dissertation project in Mineralogy.

Congratulations to Stelios Aspiotis, who defended his PhD dissertation on 28 February. He conducted his doctoral research as a Research Associate in a project on ‘Understanding Written Artefacts on Inorganic Supports at the Atomic-Scale Level: Weathering and Crystal Chemistry of the Rock-Forming Minerals’, which was headed by Boriana Mihailova, Kaja Harter-Uibopuu, and Jochen Schlüter.

The aim of the project was to develop a novel method based on Raman spectroscopy for unravelling vanished or hardly readable inscriptions on inorganic rock-base writing supports via mapping the lateral distribution of crack-enhanced weathering products. Moreover, the researchers looked at the relationship between the crystal chemistry and Raman scattering of selected layered silicates, which constitutes a first step towards the non-destructive material profiling of clay tablets to elucidate their provenance and history.

Stelios is now Principal Investigator of his own research project at the Cluster: ‘Painting the Ancient World: Crystallochemical Characterisation of Pigments and Minerals in Ancient Written Artefacts’.