Giannis Ampatziadis-Michailidis

I was born in Germany in 1984. I have studied biology at the Natural Sciences Department of UOC. My bachelor covered both environmental and molecular biology and I soon realized that I had a leaning towards the latter. I particularly enjoyed developmental and cancer biology as well as immunology. I really loved working in a laboratory and decided to focus on cancer biology. Therefore for my diploma thesis I chose to work on somatic mutations in the HER2 gene. For my master’s I selected the Cancer Genomics and Developmental Biology CGDB programme at Utrecht University. The programme consisted of two projects, 9 months and 6 months respectively. I completed my 9- month project at the Holstege lab where my work involved producing and analyzing gene expression profiles in knock out strains of the model organism Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Meta-analysis of gene expression data focused on the Ubiquitin-proteasome pathway. For the second year of my studies I was awarded the Nuffic scholarship (Netherlands organization for international cooperation in higher education). For the following period I joined Dr Swanton’s lab at London Research Institute, Cancer Research UK and worked on validation and characterization of mediators of Everolimus sensitivity, which was identified by a functional genomic screen in renal cell carcinoma. I joined the Alexander Fleming Institute in the framework of BOLD to pursue my long-term ambitions in the field of cancer and molecular biology.