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George M. Spyrou

Professor

Current Position

Bioinformatics European Research Area Chair

Head of the Bioinformatics Department

Professor

The Cyprus Institute of Neurology and Genetics
 

Education

  • BSc in Physics, University of Athens, 1994
  • MSc in Medical Physics, University of Patras, 1996
  • PhD in Medical Physics, University of Patras, 2001
  • MSc in Bioinformatics, University of Athens, 2006

 

Academic Appointments:

  • Postgraduate Course Coordinator for the Bioinformatics Course (Full semester) at the Cyprus School of Molecular Medicine (2017-2018).
  • Associate Faculty Position at the Cyprus School of Molecular Medicine (2017).
  • Full Semester Course Teaching (“Simulation Methods in Medicine and Biology”) at the Postgraduate Program "Information Technologies in Medicine and Biology", organized by the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (2009 – 2015). 
  • Half Semester Course Teaching (“Simulation Methods in Medicine and Biology”) at the Postgraduate Program "Information Technologies in Medicine and Biology", organized by the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (2016).        
  • Visiting instructor on Systems Bioinformatics and Network Analysis in two postgraduate courses: The Master’s program on “Complex Systems and Networks” at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the Master’s program on “Translational Research in Molecular Biology and Genetics” at the Democritus University of Thrace (2015 – Present).
  • Instructor at the Summer School “Methods in Micro – Nanotechnology and Nanobiotechnology” organized by the National Center for Scientific Research "Demokritos". Topics: “Applied Bioinformatics in BioNanoTechnology” (2007, 2008) and “Structural Bioinformatics: Molecular Simulations and Visualization” (2009, 2010).
  • Instructor at the Greek National Centre for Public Administration and Local Government (EKDDA) for the period 2005-2014, with over 300 lecture hours on information technology topics.
  • Supervision of 7 PhD Theses and 17 MSc Theses.
  • Member of the Steering Committee of the Postgraduate Program "Information Technologies in Medicine and Biology", UoA-TEIATH-BRFAA-NCSR DEMOKRITOS (2009-2016).                                                                                                                                                                            

 

Research Interests

Over 17 years work on research projects in the field of Medical Informatics and Bioinformatics, trying to unify them through the field of translational research. His Group expertise expands from biomedical signal/image analysis and systems of computational intelligence to structural bioinformatics, biomarker discovery, in silico drug discovery and systems bioinformatics. 
Ongoing Research Support:
Participation in:
Two H2020-WIDESPREAD-04-2017 Teaming Phase 1 projects, 
One EC Pilot Grant and one H2020- MARIE SKŁODOWSKA-CURIE INNOVATIVE TRAINING NETWORKS (EJD),
Two competitive projects awarded with computational power in Super Computing centers.  
 

Biography

Dr. George M. Spyrou is the Bioinformatics European Research Area Chair Holder and the Head of the Bioinformatics Department at the Cyprus Institute of Neurology and Genetics. He holds a BSc on Physics, an MSc on Medical Physics and an MSc on Bioinformatics as well. During his PhD he worked on algorithms and simulations focusing on breast cancer imaging. At the very beginning of the Biomedical Research Foundation of the Academy of Athens (BRFAA), Dr. Spyrou was selected to drive and supervise the design and development of the whole informatics infrastructure at BRFAA, being appointed as a Research Scientist of level B. Since 2001 and for over 10 years he worked on the strategic plan and implementation of IT development at BRFAA, acting as the Head of the Department of Informatics and New Technologies of BRFAA. In parallel, he was organizing his research group and was running his own research on bioinformatics and medical informatics. In 2007 Dr. Spyrou was promoted to Senior Research Scientist (Level A) at BRFAA after successful evaluation.  For the years 2009-2016 he was coordinating a full semester course (Simulation Methods in Medicine and Biology) in the Postgraduate Program “Information Technologies in Medicine and Biology” (in both directions: Bioinformatics and Medical Informatics) at the University of Athens.  Since 2017 Dr. Spyrou is the Bioinformatics Course Coordinator at the Cyprus School of Molecular Medicine. He is also a visiting instructor on Systems Bioinformatics and Network Analysis in other two postgraduate courses, namely the Master program on “Complex Systems and Networks” at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and the Master program on “Translational Research in Molecular Biology and Genetics” at the Democritus University of Thrace. Further to them, Dr. Spyrou has been an instructor at the Greek National Centre for Public Administration and Local Government (EKDDA) for the period 2005-2014, with over 300 lecture hours. Through his teaching activities Dr. Spyrou has the opportunity of supervising/mentoring a number of MSc and PhD students. His work includes computational methods that act as bridges between molecular biology, systems biology and molecular medicine, exploiting computational intelligence and high performance computing for multi-omics network analysis, systems bioinformatics and in silico drug discovery. Some of his in silico experiments are executed in Super-Computing Centers after successful evaluation of the proposed research projects. Dr. Spyrou is the Representative of Cyprus in the Management Committee of the COST Action CA15120 entitled:  “Open Multiscale Systems Medicine (OpenMultiMed)”. Up to now, he has served as Reviewer, Invited Speaker, Chairman and Scientific Advisory Board Member in topics related to Biomedical Informatics topics while he has authored over 160 scientific publications in peer reviewed journals and international conference proceedings.

 

Selected Publications:

  1. Anastasis Oulas, George Minadakis, Margarita Zachariou, and George Spyrou. Selecting variants of unknown significance through network-based gene-association significantly improves risk prediction for disease-control cohorts. Scientific Reports. 2019 Feb 1
  2. Andrea C. Kakouri, Christiana C. Christodoulou, Margarita Zachariou, Anastasis Oulas, George Minadakis, Christiana A. Demetriou, Christina Votsi, Eleni-Zamba Papanicolaou, Kyproula Christodoulou, George M. Spyrou. Revealing Clusters of Connected Pathways through Multisource Data Integration in Huntington’s disease and Spastic Ataxia. IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics 2018 Aug 30.
  3. G. Minadakis, M. Zachariou, A. Oulas, and G. M. Spyrou, PathwayConnector: finding complementary pathways to enhance functional analysis, Bioinformatics, Aug 14 2018.
  4. Margarita Zachariou, George Minadakis, Anastasis Oulas, Sotiroula Afxenti, George M. Spyrou. Integrating multi-source information on a single network to detect disease-related clusters of molecular mechanisms. J Proteomics. 2018 Mar 13. pii: S1874-3919(18)30104-0. doi: 10.1016/j.jprot.2018.03.009
  5. Anastasis Oulas, George Minadakis, Margarita Zachariou, Kleitos Sokratous, Marilena M. Bourdakou, George M. Spyrou. Systems Bioinformatics: increasing precision of computational diagnostics and therapeutics through network-based approaches. Briefings in Bioinformatics 2017 Nov 27. doi: 10.1093/bib/bbx151.
  6. Marilena M. Bourdakou and George M. Spyrou. Informed walks: whispering hints to gene hunters inside networks' jungle. BMC Syst Biol. 2017 Oct 11;11(1):97.

 

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