Profile

I am currently living in Cambridge, but I am originally from Greece. Back home we have 4 dogs 🐶. I love travelling, dancing and doing yoga and I recently started learning Spanish 🗺️🧘🏻. I enjoy watching musicals and my favourites are Hamilton and Lion King 🎵🦁. I love cooking and eating sweets and every Saturday morning I make pancakes with my boyfriend for breakfast 🥞.

I use samples of patients to look for errors in the DNA. I do this by either staining cells with dyes (see picture) or checking for mismatches in the DNA alphabet (e.g. having a T instead of C). The number of errors increases with age and this could result in cancer. This is why cancer is considered an ageing disease. If we can understand how cancer starts we can try to find ways to stop it.

I cycle to work everyday and I start by planning my day in detail and crack on with experiments! In the morning I check my cells and mini-organs to see if they are healthy and I feed them when necessary. As cells are live organisms, there is a special room that we grow them to protect them from harmful microrganisms. Then I go back to my bench in the lab (see first picture) and stain patient samples with dyes that will tell me if there are any errors in the DNA. This is a long process that takes up usually all my afternoon. I go the gym next to my work to do dance, box, yoga or aerobics and then I come back to count and take pictures of my stained cells (see second picture).