Myrsini Kaforou

Biography

Myrsini Kaforou is a Senior Research Fellow in Bioinformatics in the Department of Medicine. In 2017 she received a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship to work on understanding and diagnosing infectious diseases using multi-level 'omics data. Prior to that she had received an Early Career Fellowship award funded through the Wellcome Trust Institute Strategic Support Fund, as part of the Antimicrobial Research Collaborative (ARC) initiative, in collaboration with Professor Michael Levin and Dr Pantelis Georgiou. Her research focuses on the identification of host biomarkers for infectious diseases from genomic data using machine learning techniques and statistical modelling. She is particularly interested in the integration of multiple “omics” datasets to improve diagnosis and understanding of the host response to disease. Myrsini was awarded a PhD in identification of host gene expression biomarkers for Tuberculosis disease at Imperial College in 2015. Her PhD research took place within the Department of Genomics of Common Disease at the School of Public Health, supervised by Professor Michael Levin, Dr Lachlan Coin and Dr Giovanni Montana, also affiliated with the Department of Paediatrics. She received an MSc in Bioinformatics and Theoretical Systems Biology from Imperial College London in 2010 after graduating from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), with a specialisation in Biomedicine. She is a member of the EUCLIDS consortium which aims to elucidate the factors that determine susceptibility and severity in life-threatening bacterial infections of childhood, funded by the European Commission FP7 and the TBVAC2020 consortium that works towards the identification of the most promising TB vaccine candidates and accelerate their development funded by the Horizon 2020 European Commission programme.

Research Interest

Antimicrobial Research