Irene Margiolaki is currently employed as a professor in the field of "Biochemistry: Structure and Function of Proteins" at the Department of Biology of the University of Patras (UPAT, Patras, Greece). She graduated in physics from the University of Crete, Greece, in 1999. Her D.Phil. thesis on “Structural, Magnetic and Dynamic properties of fullerene- based materials” was completed in 2004 at the Department of Physics, Chemistry, and Environmental Sciences of the University of Sussex, UK. During the period 2003-2010, she was employed as an instrument scientist by the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France. An important part of her research at the ID22 High Resolution Powder Diffraction beamline of the ESRF and ongoing research activities is the development of innovative powder diffraction methods for the structural characterization of biological macromolecules when data-quality single crystals for X-ray crystallography cannot be obtained. In addition, she focuses on the combination of XRPD with synchrotron serial crystallography for the elucidation of peptide and protein structures associated with pharmaceutical importance from microcrystals. Since 2010, she has led her 15 member research team at UPAT. Her work to date has been recognized by internationally distinguished organizations such as Unesco, L'Oreal, ESRF, EPDIC, and BCA.
