Dr. Georgia Charalampous (GC) is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Geoenergy (IG), FORTH. She holds a degree in Biology and a M.Sc. in Protein Biotechnology from the Department of Biology of the University of Crete, Greece. As part of her postgraduate studies, she completed her master thesis at the Institute of Molecular Cell & Systems Biology at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK where she remained as a postgraduate researcher (2014-2015). In 2016, she moved to Chania, Crete and joined the group of Prof. Nicolas Kalogerakis, at the Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering (CHENVENG) at the Technical University of Crete (TUC), as a research associate participating in 3 European and 2 National projects (2016-2022). In the meantime, GC started her doctoral studies and in 2024 she received her PhD in Chemical and Environmental Engineering from the Technical University of Crete. Since 2022, she is a member of the IG/FORTH’s team.  

Her interests include the studying of marine microbial communities in terms of diversity, taxonomic analysis and functionality under in situ environmental conditions as well as their role in biodegradation of pollutants like hydrocarbons and overall, in marine ecosystem sustainability. She is experienced in incubation of microbial cultures under high pressure conditions, in molecular biology techniques (PCR, DNA extraction) and in bioinformatic analysis of sequencing results (16SrRNA, metagenomics).