Charikleia Karageorgiou (Clio)

Education

Sept 2017 – Sept 2022 PhD summa cum laude, Evolutionary Genetics and Genomics, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain.

Dec 2021 – July 2022 Research Fellow, Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas – Institute of Computer Science, Computational BioMedicine Laboratory, Greece.

Aug 2021 – Feb 2022 Exchange PhD Researcher, Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas – Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, Greece.
Funded by Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions – Research and Innovation Staff Exchange (RISE)

Feb 2021 – June 2021 PhD Internship, University of Zürich, Switzerland.

Sept 2016 – July 2017 MSc Bioinformatics, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain.

Sept 2014 – July 2015 MSc Advanced Genetics, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain.

Sept 2011 – June 2014 BSc (Hons) Biomedicine, University of East Anglia, United Kingdom.

Bio

Charikleia earned a B.Sc. in Biomedicine from the University of East Anglia, followed by two M.Sc. degrees in Advanced Genetics and Bioinformatics from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). She completed her Ph.D. at UAB in 2022, where she investigated polymorphic chromosomal inversions in Drosophila subobscura and their role in climate-driven adaptation.

She is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Gokcumen Lab at the University at Buffalo, where her work focuses on genome structure evolution, with particular emphasis on the mechanistic origins and consequences of structural variants. Her research integrates comparative genomics, population genetics, and molecular evolution to investigate the mechanisms driving structural variation and genomic instability across primates.

She is particularly interested in the interplay between genome architecture and recombination and how features such as low copy number repeats, repetitive elements, sequence homology and chromatin context influence the formation and maintenance of complex genomic rearrangements. Her current projects include reconstructing the evolutionary history of the amylase locus, with a focus on recurrent duplications, regulatory rewiring and functional divergence. More broadly, she is interested in understanding how structurally dynamic regions of the genome contribute to adaptation and phenotypic diversity over evolutionary timescales.

CV

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