Prof. Katerina Mania received a B.Sc. in Mathematics from the University of Crete, Greece, an M.Sc. in Advanced Computing, Global Computing and Multimedia as well as a Ph.D in Computer Science from the University of Bristol, UK.

She serves as a Professor at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the Technical University of Crete since 2006, leading the SURREAL research team which specializes in Augmented and Virtual Reality, Computer Graphics Rendering, Perceptually-optimized Computer Graphics, Brain-Computer Interfaces, Data Visualization, Gaze-contingent Displays, Haptics.

Her PhD studies were fully funded by Hewlett Packard Laboratories. Prior to her Ph.D, she was a researcher at Hewlett Packard Laboratories, UK working on 3D architectural visualisation and 3D graphics for the web. After completing her PhD in 2001, she served as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Informatics of the University of Sussex, UK from 2001 until 2006, with tenure since 2004. She has been a Visiting Researcher at NASA Ames Research Center in 2003, at the Spatial Perception and Advanced Displays research group led by Dr Stephen Ellis and has published her work, co-authored with NASA Ames researchers.

She has also been a Visiting Researcher at the Brighton and Sussex Medical School (2012, 2016, 2024), at the Warwick Manufacturing Group, University of Warwick, UK (2016). She has participated in several EPSRC UK, national (GSRT-NSRF) as well as European projects. She has served in more than 100 conference program committees and has chaired technical programs of ACM Siggraph, EUROGRAPHICS, IEEE Virtual Reality, ACM Siggraph Symposiun on Applied Perception, IEEE Conference on Games (COG). She is currently serving at the super-committee of IEEE Virtual Reality 2026 conference.

She currently serves as an Associate Editor of leading journals in VR/AR and perceptually-optimized graphics, e.g. ACM Transactions on Applied Perception and Presence, Tele-operators and Virtual Environments (MIT Press).