DrMelpomeni Kalofonou

Dr Melpomeni (Melina) Kalofonou is an Advanced Research Fellow and Group Lead in Cancer Technology at the Centre for Bio-Inspired Technology (CBIT), within the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. Her current research focuses on driving innovation in semiconductor based systems for multi-cancer diagnostic and monitoring purposes that would advance patient diagnosis, enhance treatment selection and improve cancer management through the integration of sensing technologies and novel molecular diagnostic methods. She has been building expertise in the group in the development of electrochemical methods for detection of genetic and epigenetic markers, through the integration of chemical sensors with novel molecular assay design in Lab-on-Chip diagnostic systems, in addition to algorithms and computational models for prediction of drug resistance in cancer. She has been leading interdisciplinary research projects, funded predominantly by the CRUK and the EPSRC as well as the Imperial Confidence-in-Concept scheme, to create a network of cancer specialists in case studies of breast, colorectal, ovarian and prostate cancer.

With an emphasis to apply her expertise in a wider range of healthcare applications, promoting sustainable and easily accessible technologies to patients, clinical experts and the wider public, Dr Kalofonou is also affiliated with the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University, NY as a recently appointed Adjunct Assistant Professor in Targeted Diagnostics and Therapeutics, establishing a Biomedical Engineering research theme for optimisation of targeted therapeutics through the design of new sensing technologies and machine learning algorithms, advancing engineering processes in ocular diagnostics.

Dr Kalofonou received the MEng degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2007 from the University of Patras, Greece followed by an MSc in Biomedical Engineering in the Department of Bioengineering in 2009 and a PhD from the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering in 2013 both from Imperial College London. Her PhD research focused on the application of semiconductor technology for the detection of cancer biomarkers using microchip-based chemical sensors (Ion-Sensitive Field-Effect Transistors, ISFETs) integrated with current-mode circuits as part of Lab-on-Chip systems. Her work led to the demonstration of the first proof-of-concept method using ISFETs for real-time amplification and detection of DNA methylation, an epigenetic biomarker contributing significantly in the development and progression of cancer. She continued on to become a Research Associate in Microchip-based Cancer Technologies and establish Cancer Technology in 2016 as one of the six research themes in CBIT on the convergence of Biomedical Engineering and Cancer Genetics, to conduct cross-disciplinary research, while training and enthusing the discipline in the next generation of Biomedical Engineers on research projects with clinical translation. In 2018 she was promoted to Research Fellow, leading a multidisciplinary team between Electrical Engineering and Medicine which was successful in the Department's first CRUK Multidisciplinary Award, for the development of sensing methods for detection of well-known breast cancer mutations.

Dr Kalofonou is representing the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the Cancer Research UK Imperial Centre and the CRUK Convergence Science Centre. She is a member of the IET, IEEE, IEEE-CAS, EMBS, BioMedEng and ESMO and serves on the Biomedical Circuits and Systems Technical Committee (BioCAS TC) of the IEEE CAS society, promoting the application of Biomedical Engineering research in Precision Oncology. She is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems journal (TBioCAS) and IEEE Open Journal of Circuits and Systems (OJCAS), with a continuous service as Review Committee Member in IEEE ISCAS and BioCAS and Technical Programme Committee Member for the newly launched IEEE BioSensors in 2023.