About
I come from beautiful Greece. Born and raised in Gerakas, Athens, I always feel nostalgic when I visit my village Figaleia and the nearby temple of Apollo Epicurius in Peloponnese.
I’m a molecular biologist (BSc, Democritus University of Thrace) once trained as an experimentalist (yeast times…) and who has since more than a decade now been interested in bioinformatics and computational genomics (MSc and PhD in Bioinformatics, University of Athens & NCSR “Demokritos”).
I am Chief Data Officer and co-founder at CureCollect, an early stage biotech with a mission to enable access and to democratise diverse, multi-modal data from the developing world for the benefit of oncology patients globally.
Prior CureCollect, I was Ochre Bio’s founding Director of In Silico Biology and Head of Discovery. At Ochre Bio I led a global team of computational scientists with expertise ranging from imaging, statistics, functional & computational regulatory genomics to knowledge graphs, recommendation systems and their applications to drug discovery.
Prior Ochre Bio, I was an Associate Director, Oncology Bioinformatics & Data Science at AstraZeneca’s Oncology R&D Team in Cambridge where I was responsible for Discovery Data Science efforts with the aim to develop better small-molecule drugs for oncology patients. Before AZ, I worked as a Data Scientist for Genomics England delivering the 100K Genomes Project, the 100K Genomes Project Pilot, and helping to build the infrastructure for the Genomic Medicine Service in the NHS.
During the later times of my academic life, I spent two years as an MRC Postdoctoral (and now visiting) scientist at Boris Lenhard’s group at the MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences & Imperial College London working on a largely enigmatic class of genomic elements called Conserved Non-coding Elements (CNEs). I am also a visiting scientist at the NCSR Demokritos where I participate in the BioASQ project.
My work spans various fields including medicine (rare diseases and cancer; 100K Genomes Project; DNA replication), AI/ML including knowledge graphs and algorithm development in biology (CNEFinder, CNEr, oncoEnrichR, avoided words). It has been published in various peer-reviewed journals including NEJM, Lancet Neurology, Nature, Nature Cancer, Nucleic Acids Research, Genome Research, Bioinformatics.
A copy of my current CV can be found here: CV
LATEST NEWS
- Our latest publication in Nature Communications describes the application of knowledge graphs to CRISPR screens to identify novel drivers of resistance to cancer treatments
- Happy to join the Editorial Board of BMC Bioinformatics
Connect via
Trivia
My Erdős number is at most 3 via Costas S. Iliopoulos → David E. Daykin → Paul Erdős.