We are happy to announce that IMBBC Research Fellow Anastasia Gioti was awarded a Fulbright Visiting Scholar Fellowship for the academic year 2026-2027. The Scholarship will support a 3-month research visit to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in Massachusetts.
Anastasia Gioti (second from the right) with Fulbright Fellows Greece 2026-2027 at the annual award ceremony, @Fulbright Foundation Greece, June 2026.
Anastasia is an experienced fungal biologist combining bioinformatics with genomics approaches. At HCMR, she maintains a local collection of marine fungi, which she studies for their bioremediation potential, and has developed methods for studying fungal communities from various marine environments. At WHOI, she will continue in the second direction, by “mining” fungi from a global dataset of 157 meta-tatranscriptomes coming from low-oxygen ocean samples. The project, aiming to explore fungal roles in nutrient cycling, will advance our understanding of the biogeochemistry of oxygen-minimum zones (OMZ), which are currently expanding in the oceans due to global warming.
Global map of minimum molecular oxygen concentrations, with OMZs in blue (from Wright et al, Nature Reviews Microbiology 2012).
The Fulbright Visiting Scholar Program is designed to enable highly-qualified Greek scholars to engage in institutional collaboration with U.S. academic institutions and support their growth through opportunities of networking and teaching. During her stay, Anastasia Gioti will work together with Research Scientist Maria Pachiadaki, a leader in the field of microbial ecology of extreme environments. Moreover, she will participate in the WHOI-MIT Environmental Bioinformatics MSc. program with lectures and practicals. She further plans to use the Outreach Lecture Fund and Enrichment Seminars options offered through the Fulbright network to share her research outputs with additional U.S. Universities