- Team Leader: Kostas Bourtzis -


Brief description of the organization:
Research in the University of Ioannina is unlimited within of course the framework of the academic ethic. All research activities are characterized by transparency and are accessible to all the members of the scientific community and to society in general. The Institution encourages both basic and applied research. It also encourages the supply of scientific, technological and educational services from exterior funds and grants, since, firstly the educational and research activities are not obstructed or impeded, secondly the supplied service has scientific interest and thus promotes science in practice and thirdly does not aim entirely to the profit.

Main tasks in the project:
UOIRC will contribute to: (i) Work package management; (ii) Contribute to updating the web site of the project and the related newsgroup; (iii) Organization of the project meetings and of the meetings of the Steering Committee; (iv) Training of one of the three experienced scientists recruited with the project by Partner 2; (v) Organization of all the dissemination initiatives foreseen with the project.

Profiles of staff members:
The research team currently includes 7 members: the coordinator (Dr. Kostas Bourtzis), four research fellows (Drs. George Tsiamis, Vassiliki Karapapa, Zoe Veneti and Aggeliki Saridaki) and two Ph.D. students (Athina Hamalaki and Stefanos Siozios). Assoc. Prof. Kostas Bourtzis is extremely active in the field of host-microbe interactions for a number of years. His initial expertise lies in the study of insect hosts - Wolbachia interactions but in the recent years he is expanding his research interests in the field of environmental microbiology and biotechnology and particularly in the unravelling of microbial diversity and the interactions of microbes with biotic and abiotic environment. His lab has been the host institution for the EMBO Long Term Fellowship (2002-2004) of Dr. George Tsiamis (“Dissection of the signal transduction pathway that leads to disease in Pseudomonas syringae – Arabidobsis interaction”. Dr. Tsiamis’ expertise lies in the area of molecular plant-microbe interactions and has recently been expanded in the field of environmental microbiology and biotechnology. Zoe Veneti and Vassiliki Karapapa joined the lab in 2004 in the frame of national grants “Characterization of new ecotypes of Arabidopsis thaliana from Greece and molecular characterization of the Arabidopsis plant proteins that interact with bacterial effector proteins” and their expertise is on insect symbiosis and the Arabidopsis/Verticillium system respectively. Dr. Saridaki just joined the lab (got her PhD on 2006) and her expertise is on proteomics. The two students are at different stages of their PhD studies: Siozios is at the writing stage while Hamalaki is at the middle of their theses. Dr. Bourtzis and members of his lab have extensively published in peer-reviewed journals including publications in high impact journals such as Nature, Science, PNAS, EMBO Journal and others (see selected list below). Dr. Bourtzis has co-edited with Prof. Miller (University of California, Riverside, USA) three books on Insect Symbiosis: (a) Insect Symbiosis (2003), (b) Insect Symbiosis 2 (2006) and (c) Insect Symbiosis 3 (2008). Dr. Bourtzis is currently member of the Editorial Board of the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology published by the American Society for Microbiology (1/1/2007 – 31/12/2009).