Maria Kyriakidou, Ph.D.

Dr. Maria Kyriakidou is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Fryer Lab, within the Bioinnovation and Genome Sciences Division at the Translational Genomics Research Institute. Dr. Kyriakidou graduated from McGill University (Montréal, Canada) after completing her Ph.D in plant genomics, where she gained her expertise in de novo genome assembly, single and larger variation detection, pan-genome graph construction and phylogenetic analysis.

Dr. Kyriakidou joined the Fryer Lab last January where she learning to analyze single cell proteomics and RNA- sequencing data. She is interested in integrating her previous knowledge in logistic models and evolutionary dynamics in space to understand Alzheimer’s Disease and brain cancer.

Dr. Kyriakidou joined TGen as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Barthel Lab in November 2022. During her work in the Barthel Lab, she worked on detecting copy number variants during telomere crisis, on logistic regression models, and constructed pipelines for targeted and whole genome sequencing analysis. Her main project was focused on characterizing the (epi)genetic evolutionary phylodynamics of glioma cells in space. For her study, she characterized the genetic and the epigenetic dynamics of multiple biopsies per patient, for a panel of 16 patients. She further correlated these relationships with the spatial distance of these samples and their histology. Part of this project was to construct an R package for the estimation of the aneuploidy levels.

Dr. Kyriakidou was a co-mentor of a Helios Scholar intern in the summer of 2023. In November 2023, she was awarded with the Women’s Philanthropy Council (WPC) Grant Award.

Visit Fryer Lab website.