Dr. George Markou was born in Cyprus in 1979. During his studies at the NTUA[GM1] (1999-2004), he managed to be the recipient of numerous academic awards and scholarships. After he completed his undergraduate studies with honors (2004), he was accepted into the Master of Science 2-year program (NTUA), which he managed to finish in 1 year (2005). In 2005, he was accepted as a Ph.D. candidate (NTUA) under the supervision of Prof. Manolis Papadrakakis[GM2] in the field of computational mechanics. During his Ph.D. dissertation, Dr. Markou was the recipient of 2 scholarships and 1 research fund. In January 2009, he started working as a special staff at the Frederick University of Cyprus for the Civil Engineering Department, where he taught several courses. In January 2011, he received his Ph.D. title, while continuing to work, as a special staff at Frederick University and was also working as a Civil Engineering consultant.

Dr. Markou also worked as a Civil Engineer since 2004 and he has been a registered Professional Engineer ΕΤΕΚ (Pr.Eng.) since 2009 and ECSA since 2019. As a Civil Engineer, Dr. Markou designed more than 40 projects, which mainly involved seismically resistant residential and commercial RC buildings with the use of the Cyprus, New Greek Earthquake Design Code, and Eurocodes. In addition to that, he was also involved with the design of retaining walls, swimming pools, and wooden roof systems. He also worked as a Civil Engineering consultant for different firms internationally.

As an academic, he worked as an Assistant and Associate Professor at the ALHOSN University in Abu Dhabi in the Civil Engineering Department for 6 years (2011–2017). He also worked as an Associate Professor at the Civil Engineering Department of the UCSC University in Chile and as a Research Visitor at the University Of Sheffield, UK in 2018. He joined the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Pretoria in September 2018, where currently he is appointed as a Research Associate[GM3] . Dr Markou joined CUT in September 2024 and works as a faculty member at the Department of Civil Engineering and Geomatics.

His research interests cover a large field of scientific subjects such as FEM software development, machine learning, health monitoring and damage diagnosis of structures, FRP material model development and modeling, seismic assessment of building and bridge reinforced concrete structures through numerical simulations, soil-structure interaction, modeling of fiber reinforced concrete, modeling of retrofitted structures, fluid-structure interaction, large-scale problems, and parallel processing. Dr. Markou is also the software architect of the research finite element analysis software ReConAn FEA[GM4] .