Wonderful modern scientists!

Currently in laboratories, companies and organizations around the world, numerous interdisciplinary teams are working tirelessly for improving our future. The ones I have had the pleasure to meet in person, whether they are team members, mentors or our guests or even my colleagues are incredibly skilled in their subjects / work and in addition have a great desire to improve our world.

In the following lines I will talk about a few Greek scientists that I happen to know personally and how wonderful, versatile and approachable they are. Women who work miracles with their work and lead whole scientific fields are here and many come from our country! On our page we do our best by giving them space to communicate their work to the world.

More specifically, I have three great examples of our mentors: Dr. Eleni Dovrou, Dr. Marianna Rapsomaniki, and Niki Sorogas. Eleni has just finished a cycle of research at Max Planck in Germany and is returning to Greece to continue her studies in atmospheric chemistry. After studying and doing research in Patras, Marianna is now a key executive at IBM in Zurich, leading her own artificial intelligence team at a company with a focus on modeling various cancers with transcriptome data. The multi-talented Niki, born in Australia, returned to Greece to develop her love for music and science. She is an active volunteer, she is also working at Amalia Technologies while completing her PhD in solid state physics.

Three more examples come from excellent guests we have hosted so far in our magazine, Dr. Pavlina Νanou, Dr. Eleni Vardoulaki and Dr. Marianna Christodoulou. Pavlina is an engineer with studies in Greece and the Netherlands and a career spanning from her role as a team leader in a research organization to currently being a co-founder and managing director of Torwash BV a company converting wet organic residues into a solid biofuel. Eleni started her research in astrophysics from the University of Ioannina to be today an internationally renowned researcher in Germany where she studies galaxies by traveling back in time thanks to the properties of light and microscopes. Marianna started at AUTH and her research in immunobiology led her to become a professor at the University of Cyprus today where she studies proteins involved in immune diseases.

Finally, through work, I had the pleasure to meet Dr. Alexandra Turoutoglou, Dr. Efi Antonopoulou, and Dr. Irinna Papageli. Alexandra is a professor of neurology at Harvard University having started at AUTH. With numerous publications and distinctions, she is also the president of the Hellenic Bioscience Association of the USA and contributed to the creation and awarding of awards at our awards last year. Efi is one of the most charismatic professors I have met in the field of Biology. After working in Sweden as a researcher, she returned to Greece to become a professor of physiology at AUTH, where she continues to publish her findings in endocrinology, metabolism and reproduction of marine organisms. Irinna started her studies at the University of Patras, continued at a doctoral level in England, and after many awards and successful research activities at Yale, today has her own research group at the Biomarin company in California, USA.

So, let’s admire them, let’s celebrate the fact that we are from the same country and let’s try to do something in the positive direction as well. This is why, we, Greek Women in STEM, are inviting you to our symposium celebrating them. It will take place between the 16th and 18th of December, 2022, in Serafio (with the option of live-streaming).

Come along and celebrate!