DrMyrsini Kaforou

Myrsini Kaforou is a Senior Lecturer in Bioinformatics in the Department of Infectious Disease. Her research focuses on the identification of host biomarkers for infectious diseases from genomic, transcriptomic and proteomic datasets using machine learning techniques and statistical modelling. She is particularly interested in the integration of multiple “-omics” datasets to improve diagnosis and understanding of the host response to infection.

In 2017 she received a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship to work on understanding and diagnosing infectious diseases using multi-level 'omics data, and in 2019 the Emerging Leaders Prize in Antimicrobial Resistance from the Medical Research Foundation to work on improving diagnosis ofinfectious diseases using patients' blood RNA to reduce antibiotic misuse.

Prior to that, she had received an Early Career Fellowship award funded through the Wellcome Trust Institute Strategic Support Fund, as part of the Antimicrobial Research Collaborative (ARC) initiative. Her PhD was awarded from Imperial College in 2015 on the identification of host gene expression biomarkers for tuberculosis disease. She completed the MSc in Bioinformatics and Theoretical Systems Biology from Imperial College London after graduating from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), with a specialisation in Biomedicine.

She is leading the bioinformatics, data management and modelling work packages within the international DIAMONDS and PERFORM consortia, which aim to improve diagnosis and management of febrile patients, through application of sophisticated transcriptomic and bioinformatics approaches to large-scale patient cohorts. Myrsini is a member of the Imperial College Network of Excellence in Malaria, with a focus on Diagnostics and Engineering for Malaria. She has been a member of the EUCLIDS and TBVAC2020 consortia which aimed to elucidate the factors that determine susceptibility and severity in life-threatening bacterial infections of childhood and identify promising TB vaccine candidates and accelerate their development, respectively.