COORDINATOR
Anna Papadopoulou
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Anna is as an Assistant Professor at UCY and head of the recently founded Molecular Ecology and Evolution Lab. Her research focuses on the use of molecular genetic tools for the study of island biodiversity. She combines microevolutionary approaches (phylogeography and population genetics) with a macroecological perspective to understand the processes that generate and maintain biodiversity in island systems. She also applies DNA-based methodologies for large-scale biodiversity assessment and community ecology. Currently she is taking advantage of the enormous potential offered by Next-Generation Sequencing technologies and she uses genome-wide data to enhance all aspects of her research.
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GROUP MEMBERS
Spyros Sfenthourakis
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Spyros is an Associate Professor at UCY, head of the Ecology and Biodiversity Lab and currently Chair of the Department of Biological Sciences. His main research interests include island biogeography, community ecology, systematics and phylogeography, and is an expert in terrestrial isopod taxonomy having described more than 20 species new to science. He has coordinated and/or worked in several projects related to island biodiversity. He has more than 20 years experience in research, nature conservation, promoting and dissemination of science, participation in biodiversity related national fora (in Greece and Cyprus), and in conducting and coordinating research and conservation projects. He is also active in science communication, having given numerous public lectures and translated 20 public science books and textbooks.
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Vasilis Promponas
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Vasilis is an Assistant Professor at UCY and head of the Bioinformatics Research Lab. His research interests focus on the development of empirical, statistical and machine learning methods/tools and specialized databases for exploiting available types of biological information towards understanding biological systems. Specifically, his key contributions are in the fields of sequence analysis, structural bioinformatics and computational comparative genomics, participating in the design and benchmarking of special hardware architectures for protein sequence analysis.
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Víctor Noguerales
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Víctor is a postdoctoral researcher at UCY. He is mainly interested in the study of the interplay between evolution and ecology at different spatiotemporal and evolutionary scales. The overall goal of his research is to elucidate the causes of intra- and inter-specific genetic/phenotypic variation to understand the adaptive/neutral evolutionary mechanisms behind incipient speciation processes. He combines genetics/genomics, geometric morphometrics and ecological data under a comprehensive analytical framework in order to get robust inferences about how geography and varying environmental conditions over time and space determine genetic differentiation among populations and, ultimately, ongoing speciation processes.
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Emmanouil (Manolis) Meramveliotakis |
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Manolis is a PhD student, member of the Molecular Ecology and Evolution laboratory, at UCY. He is primarily interested in how micro-evolutionary processes are linked to the observed macro-evolutionary patterns. Currently, he is studying a darkling beetle species complex, combining population-level inference with phylogenetic reconstruction and employing genome-wide data, in order to address the role of habitat persistence in species diversification, demographic history and molecular evolution.
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Andreas Dimitriou |
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Andreas is a PhD student at the Biodiversity and Ecology lab. His research focuses on the molecular phylogeny of terrestrial isopods (Isopoda: Oniscidea), a taxon with global distribution and long evolutionary history, represented by more than 3,700 species in some 500 genera and 37 families. He uses approaches pertinent to three different scales: at a large scale, he aims to clarify relationships among major clades of Oniscidea and other isopod suborders, at the intermediate scale, to reconstruct the phylogeny of all Oniscidea at the genus level, and at a local scale, to explore divergence patterns among species and populations within the long isolated island of Cyprus.
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Loudmila Jelinscaia Lagou |
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Loudmila has recently graduated from the Biology department of UCY. Her subjects of interest are evolution and ecology, and her final year project focused on the phylogeny of Helopini, a tribe of the beetle family Tenebrionidae. She works on the dissemination activities of iBioGen, including preparation of educational material, management of social media, organisation of exhibitions at Environmental Education centres and other dissemination events.
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Toumazis Toumazi |
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Toumazis is the Project Officer of the Project. Somewhere between geology, software implementation and lecturing, since 2010 he has switched to managing European and National funded projects. He has a very strong experience in managing projects; i.e. H2020, Erasmus+, COST Actions, LIFE, ENPI-CBC MED, Tempus, Structural Funds, National and Bilateral projects (total budged managed around 10 Million euro). His duties among others include the coordination of project tasks and the financial control of the project.
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The coordinating UCY team has a broad experience in empirical island biodiversity research, as well as in genomics and bioinformatics, which will be the basis for stimulating further development in island biodiversity genomics. The UCY team members have complementary research interests and expertise related to iBioGen, including: high-throughput DNA-based biodiversity assessment, application of genomics for demographic inference in islands, comparative genomics and bioinformatics, traditional island biogeography theory. The UCY team can guarantee efficient coordination and project management (Work Package 1), given that a member of the team is the Head of the Department of Biological Sciences (Dr Sfenthourakis), with very long experience in administrative management and scientific coordination. Additionally, the UCY team has experience with traditional biodiversity monitoring and conservation projects and retains links with biodiversity stakeholders in Cyprus and relevant NGOs, which will be invaluable for the dissemination aspects of iBioGen (Work Package 5). The UCY team as the coordinator of the project and the institution that will be on the receiving end of the coordination and training activities, will be contributing actively to all Work Packages with adequate resources.
