Panayiota Poirazi MSc, PhD

Panayiota Poirazi is a Director of Research and the Head of the Computational Biology Lab at the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology (IMBB) at the Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas (FORTH), in Heraklion, Crete, Greece. She received her Bachelor in Mathematics with honors from the University of Cyprus in 1996. She received her Master and Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering (Computational Neuroscience) also with honors in 1998 and 2000, respectively, from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. From 2001-2004.

She worked as a postdoctoral/Marie Curie fellow first in the Biomedical Science Research Center ‘Alexander Fleming’ in Athens, Greece (2001-2002) and then in the IMBB-FORTH (2002-2004), where she has been a Principal Investigator since 2004. She has made seminal contributions in the neuroscience field, regarding primarily the role of dendrites in learning and memory. She has received several awards for academic excellence, including the EMBO Young Investigator award in 2005, two Marie Curie fellowships (2002 and 2008), a Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) in 2012 and the “Manolis Christofides” Young Cypriot Investigator award in 2014. She is a member of AcademiaNet: a European portal for outstanding women scientists since 2013 while in 2014 she represented the ERC at the World Economic Forum, Annual Meeting of the New Champions as one of the top 40 Young Scientists of the world.