BIO

Marilena obtained her BSc in Pharmacy at the University of Athens, Greece in 2012. For her final year dissertation she conducted research on the ‘Preparation, physicochemical characterization and study of self-assembly of liposomes incorporating active molecules’. In 2013 she completed with Distinction the MSc in Drug Delivery at the UCL School of Pharmacy, University College London. Her research project focused on the use of peptide nanofibres for the delivery of siRNA. Marilena joined the Nanomedicine Lab at the University of Manchester as a Marie Curie Early Stage Fellow and full-time PhD student under the PATHCHOOSER Marie Skłodowska-Curie ITN on the development of the nanoparticle protein corona as a tool for cancer diagnostics.

After her PhD, Marilena obtained a postdoctoral fellowship by a Medical Research Council (MRC) Momentum Award to work on the discovery of novel biomarkers in Alzheimers disease. During that time, she was awarded a Manchester Molecular Pathology Innovation Centre (MMPathIC) Pump Priming Grant and the CRUK Pioneer Award to work on the nanoparticle-enabled discovery of blood biomarkers for a variety of pathologies. In December 2018, became Research Fellow and Team Leader in Nano-Omics and in January 2020 was appointed as Lecturer in NanoOmics. Her team aims to develop multi-omics enrichment nanotechnology platforms to explore disease pathways and to uncover molecular biomarkers.