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 currently work as Director of In Silico Biology at Ochre Bio in Oxford, UK focussing on chronic liver diseases, a silent killer with huge unmet need. At Ochre Bio, I am fortunate to lead a global team of talented, computational scientists with expertise ranging from imaging, statistics, functional & computational regulatory genomics to knowledge graphs, recommendation systems and their applications to drug discovery. We harness bulk-, scRNAseq, snRNAseq, CRISPR, imaging, liver perfusions data and knowledge graphs to tackle important questions for liver biology testing out RNA oligos in whole human livers, PCLS and primary cell lines.
Prior to joining 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 pilot study of whole genome sequencing (WGS) in rare disease diagnosis in a national health care system published at The New England Journal of Medicine
- Happy to join the Editorial Board of BMC Medical Genomics
- Our study on “Whole genome sequencing for the diagnosis of neurological repeat expansion disorders in the UK: a retrospective diagnostic accuracy and prospective clinical validation study” published at The Lancet Neurology
- 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
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Trivia
My Erdős number is at most 3 via Costas S. Iliopoulos → David E. Daykin → Paul Erdős.