Maya Thanou is a Reader in the Institute of Pharmaceutical Science, King’s College London. She finished her PhD in LACDR (Leiden/Amsterdam Centre for Drug Research) and after a short period in Kytogenics Pharmaceuticals, she moved as Lecturer in Cardiff University. She was awarded the Dorothy Hodgkin Royal Society Research Fellowship and she continued research at Imperial College London, at the Department of Chemistry. In her research she is engineering image guided nanoparticles, as novel drug delivery devices. She has published a book with the title Theranostics, Image guided drug delivery, about 90 academic articles and she is the inventor of several patents. In 2017 she co-founded the AJMmed-i-caps that focuses in developing products for colorectal cancer detection and in 2020 she co-founded Apeikon that develops theranostics and triggered targeted treatments for solid tumours. She is an academic innovator and entrepreneur.