I graduated with a degree in Chemistry from the University of Athens in 1995 and obtained a master’s degree in Analytical Chemistry in 1998. In 1999 I joined the group of Dr I. Mavridis at the National Centre for Scientific Research Demokritos for a PhD in crystallography. From 2003 to 2007 I worked as post-doctoral fellow at the EMBL-Hamburg outstation, focusing on proteins of the cardiac muscle. I continued my work on cytoskeletal proteins at the University of Vienna and in 2013 I moved to Birkbeck College, University of London, initially as post-doc and later as the co-ordinator of the protein crystallography and biophysics laboratory.
I am using a variety of structural biology approaches to elucidate the architecture and function of biological systems in health and disease with expertise in protein crystallography, cryoEM and in a variety of biophysical and molecular biology approaches.
My main focus of reseach is the understanding of the cardiac cytoarchitecture and how protein variants can cause cardiac arrest or pathologies of the heart. I am also interested in the biochemistry of the mitochondrial respiratory chain where I have studied by cryoEM the assembly of supercomplexes. In a third project I am focusing on inhibitors of the HIV capsids and more recently on the inhibition of various SARS-CoV-2 components.