Scientific associate
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece
Maria Papatsirou is a third-year Ph.D. student at the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Faculty of Biology, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece, under the supervision of Prof. Andreas Scorilas. Her research interests include alternative splicing of pre-messenger RNA, circRNA biology, RNA sequencing, and pharmacogenomics. She completed her Final Year Dissertation at the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, where her research focused on the structure analysis of alternative splicing products of the human L-DOPA Decarboxylase (DDC) gene. Then, she completed an internship in the framework of the Erasmus+ work placement program, at the Viruses and Cancer Unit, European Institute of Oncology (IEO), Milan, Italy, where she worked under the supervision of Dr. Susanna Chiocca and contributed to research projects related to head and neck cancer and treatment response. The topic of her Ph.D. thesis is the identification of circular RNAs (circRNAs) through massive parallel sequencing and study of them in human cancer cells under the effect of antineoplastic agents. So far, she has six publications in international, peer-reviewed scientific journals, has submitted 155 sequences to GenBank® of NCBI, and has presented her research findings at twelve conferences and symposiums. Moreover, Ms. Papatsirou has also received a fellowship and travel grant for presenting the results of her research at the 22nd FEBS Young Scientists' Forum (YSF) and the 47th FEBS Congress. Finally, she has worked as a research assistant, under Dr. Evangelos Terpos, for the investigation of the potential of circRNAs as efficient prognostic and diagnostic biomarkers for multiple myeloma.