Senior Director of Communications
Stevens Institute of Technology

Thania Benios is a public relations professional with 17 years of experience working at universities and non-profit agencies. Thania is currently the senior director of communications at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J.

Over her career, Thania has become an expert at translating and promoting complex scientific concepts into engaging content to drive news coverage, fundraising, marketing and visibility with the scientific community, donors and corporate partners. She has successfully promoted and secured media coverage for researchers, administrators, and executives in the biomedical and life sciences. As the inaugural director of public relations at Stevens in 2018, Thania drew upon her then 12 years of experience to help elevate the university’s prestige and reputation. By building trust across campus with faculty and executives, and managing cross-functional relationships with strategic content, government and community relations, and social media, she increased coverage in top-tier media by 443 percent and faculty engagement by 540 percent. Thania excels at communicating research findings for faculty in clear, compelling, and responsible prose that piques reporters’ interest. In 2023, she was honored with the Employee Excellence Award for Strengthened Reputation, Increased Prestige at Stevens.

Prior to joining Stevens, Thania was the health and science editor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While at UNC-Chapel Hill, Thania helped lead and organize the National Association of Science Writers conference in Raleigh, N.C., in 2012. She oversaw communications for the for public-private partnership, between UNC-Chapel Hill and GSK, aimed at once and for all curing AIDS. And she organized and publicized a rare meeting of the world’s most preeminent physicists, headlined by the late Dr. Stephen Hawking. at the Hawking Radiation Conference in Stockholm, Sweden, Thania is originally from Athens, Greece and she was raised in Connecticut. Thania earned a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience from Trinity College in Hartford, Conn and holds an M.A. in journalism and an M.S. in science writing from Columbia Journalism School at Columbia University in New York, NY.