Funded Research
A list of research projects in which I have actively participated.
LATE-AYA
Duration: 2025-2030
Funder: HORIZON-MISS-2024-CANCER-01-05
Description: Adolescents and Young Adults (AYAs) face a distinct set of challenges, including increased risks of secondary cancers, cardiovascular diseases, infertility, and mental health issueslike anxiety and depression. Oncology programs delivering care to AYAs provide survivors with individualised survivorship care plans at the end of treatment, to accompany follow-up with their primary care providers. However, adherence to these plans is often scarce, due to differences in AYA survivors’ age, sex, cancer treatment received, and socioeconomical conditions. Knowledge and understanding of such factors and of related late effects and impacts on quality of life is fundamental to providing effective survivorship care. The ubiquitous use of mobile devices by AYAs offers an opportunity to increase knowledge and understanding of AYAs cancer survivors’ health status and behaviours, allowing the modelling of late effects and quality of life trajectories in the different age subgroups. Digital health interventions overcome many barriers to AYA participation in survivorship programs. LATE-AYA seeks to fill this gap by empowering AYAs to better manage their health and well-being post-cancer, by developing an AI-driven digital phenotyping platform for managing late effects (LE) of cancer treatment. The project will implement a holistic, non-invasive approach through digital tools such as smartphones and wearables to monitor physical, psychological, and social well-being. The project will focus on preventive health behaviours, psychological support, and social reintegration, providing personalized care through digital interventions. LATE-AYA will contribute to long-term quality of life improvements, facilitate early detection of LE, and provide data-driven insights on the impact of lifestyle choices on health outcomes. This project is supported by a diverse consortium of European institutions and will leverage the UNCAN.eu platform to share data and models, fostering wider collaboration across the EU. This action is part of the Cancer Mission cluster of projects on “Quality of life (AYA)”.
Odyssey
Connecting molecular and geographical biodiversity data
Duration: 2025-2026
Funder: ELIXIR Scientific Programme 2024-2028 (BFSP)
Description: Odyssey is a web portal in the form of a user-friendly interface that will allow researchers, educators and citizens to navigate into the world of molecular biodiversity using Greece and Norway as case studies, two countries with characteristic and unique biodiversity wealth, representative for Mediterranean and Nordic types of ecosystems respectively. Based on existing sources of information and prototype applications that are available for specific regions and taxa, this project aims to link actual efforts and develop a new interface to offer diverse functionalities for data exploration and analysis such as descriptive statistics, graphs, maps, customizable data filters, and dynamic visualisations.
ELIXIR STEERS
Developing, consolidating and optimising ELIXIR as an European research infrastructure
Duration: 03/2024 – 2027
Funder: HORIZON-INFRA-2023-DEV-01
Description: ELIXIR-STEERS aims to help life science researchers to access national data sets and conduct large-scale, cross-border analysis of data from across Europe. It will promote good software management practices and support life scientists with their software management needs. It will collect these good practices into a toolkit for green and reproducible software and workflows.
SciLake
Democratising and making sense out of heterogeneous scholarly content
Duration: 2023 – 2026
Funder: HORIZON-INFRA-2021-EOSC-01-04
Description: SciLake’s mission is to build upon the OpenAIRE ecosystem and EOSC services to (a) facilitate and empower the creation, interlinking and maintenance of SKGs and the execution of data science and graph mining queries on top of them, (b) contribute to the democratization of scholarly content and the related added value services implementing a community-driven management approach, and (c) offer advanced, AI-assisted services that exploit customised perspectives of scientific merit to assist the navigation of the vast scientific knowledge space. In brief, SciLake will develop, support, and offer customisable services to the research community following a two-tier service architecture. First, it will offer a comprehensive, open, transparent, and customisable scientific data-lake-as-a-service (service tier 1), empowering and facilitating the creation, interlinking, and maintenance of SKGs both across and within different scientific disciplines. On top of that, it will build and offer a tier of customisable, AI-assisted services that facilitate the navigation of scholarly content following a scientific merit-driven approach (tier 2), focusing on two merit aspects which are crucial for the research community at large: impact and reproducibility. The services in both tiers will leverage advanced AI techniques (text and graph mining) that are going to exploit and extend existing technologies provided by SciLake’s technology partners. Finally, to showcase the value of the provided services and their capability to address current and anticipated needs of different research communities, four scientific domains (neuroscience, cancer research, transportation, and energy) have been selected to serve as pilots. For each, the developed services will be customised, to accommodate differences in research procedures, practices, impact measures and types of research objects, and will be validated and evaluated through real-world use cases.