SHORT BIO

Despina Kalfakakou is a postdoctoral researcher at the Archimedes AI Unit within the Athena Research Center. She earned her BSc in Informatics & Telecommunications and her MSc in Bioinformatics from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in 2012 and 2015, respectively. In 2021, she completed her PhD at NCSR “Demokritos” in Athens, in collaboration with the Biology Department of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, under the supervision of Drs. Irene Konstantopoulou and Eleni Drosopoulou. Her doctoral research focused on cancer genetics and the development of bioinformatics tools with clinical utility for precision medicine.

From 2021 to 2025, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Division of Precision Medicine, NYU Grossman School of Medicine, co-mentored by Drs. Aristotelis Tsirigos and Diane Simeone. There, she led a translational project on the clonal heterogeneity of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, investigating clone–microenvironment interactions and mechanisms of disease progression and therapy resistance. She also mentored junior colleagues and served as Chair of the Postdoctoral Association Council.

Despina’s postdoctoral work was supported by a Sky Foundation seed grant, where she served as principal investigator, and her PhD was funded by a full scholarship from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. She has presented her research at national and international conferences and has contributed to more than 20 peer-reviewed publications.

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Despina’s research focuses on applying and developing computational and bioinformatics methods to analyze large-scale genomic, transcriptomic, metagenomic, and metabolomic data, including single-cell and spatial multi-omics. Her work explores clonal dynamics, tumor initiation and progression, and tumor–microenvironment interactions in cancer. She is also investigating how environmental factors, including nutrition and socio-economic conditions, influence cancer development and treatment response. By integrating high-throughput multi-omics data with clinical and environmental information, she aims to advance cancer diagnostics and personalized medicine.