Profile

I was born and raised in Greece and particularly in Piraeus, the port of Athens.

When I was at school, I was a very good student that had absolutely no idea what to be when I grow up! I enjoyed all the courses, although most of the times, you would find me working on a project totally irrelevant( poetry, drama club, or setting up a new library scheme!). After 3 years of lyceum, the equivalent of  A-Levels here in UK, I was introduced to the possibility of science. And that was it! I passed to the Agricultural Biotechnology department of the Agricultural University of Athens and I started studying anything from Botany to Recombinant DNA! After 5 years I had a degree equivalent to a MSc and no clue of what to do next.

That’s when I applied for an Erasmus project in the John Innes Centre, in Norwich,UK and it changed my life forever. I went back to Athens for a second Master’s degree, and the last 2 years I am lucky enough to do a PhD degree in Norwich on antibiotic discovery.

Apart from science, I love baking, cooking and eating, especially if I get to cook for my friends while we are on a marathon of board games!Also, I enjoy travelling around the world and meeting new cultures and civilizations.

I am currently fluent at Greek(dah!), English, French and communicating at Spanish, but I aim to be able to speak at least 3 more languages in the next few years! Just love it when I can communicate with as many people as possible!!

I am working with bacteria isolated from Kenyan fungus growing ants. The ants cultivate the fungus as a food source, while protecting it against infections by using the antibiotics produced by the bacteria on them.

It is an exciting but demanding project that combines genetic manipulations of the strains and extensive production lines in different media to monitor different compounds. Once we have any interesting compound, we test its action against strains that cause infections such as Candida albicans and Enterobacter aerogenes.

The challenging part after we spot a compound is to isolate adequate quantities of it, test to see if it kills the ‘bad bugs’ and match it to genome of the bacteria.

I usually start in the lab around 8:30-9:00 by making the list of things to do for the day. Then, I spend most of my day in the lab trying to get my bacteria to grow, prepare extractions of many litres of culture and doing bioassays against infectious microorganisms. If it is a good day, I will spend some time analyzing results in the office. If things don’t work out as planned, I will re -plan for the repeat of the experiment. Some days, I need to prepare reports of my progress and attend meetings of my group or my department.

Some of the days, might be totally different, when you will find me participating in conferences and/or outreach events and preparing workshops for schools or visitors here in the Norwich Research Park.

At the end of the day, I will check that everything is prepared for the next day, for example set up overnight cultures and order necessary ingredients and tools before heading back home.