Anastasia Gioti is a Research Fellow in Microbial Bioinformatics with more than 20 years professional experience in France, UK, Sweden, the U.S.A., and Greece. Initially trained in Biology (NKUA, Greece), she obtained Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in Genomics (University Paris-XI, France), and further specialized in Bioinformatics (Institut Pasteur Paris, France). In her research, Anastasia has investigated pathogenicity, symbiosis, bioremediation and genome evolution in fungi and bacteria, using a range of data technologies and types (-omic, meta-, text). She has secured independent funding for many of her projects from Swedish, Greek and French research agencies and ministries. As an Assistant Professor (American Farm School, Thessaloniki), she has taught Biology, Statistics and Bioinformatics at the B.Sc. and M.Sc. levels, while she has been actively accompanying students in their first steps in Bioinformatics as a research project supervisor since 2010. Anastasia’s latest research revolves around the themes of climate change and biodiversity. Through research for the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research in Crete, communication activities for Harokopeio University Athens, and educational workshops for Ecomuseum Zagori Greece, she works on two complementary directions: 1) Awareness of communities on biodiversity loss, through writing of policy briefs (Horizon project Biotrails), and running citizen science events for biodiversity monitoring (Erasmus+ projects); 2) Enriching scientific evidence on a hidden component of biodiversity and ecosystem services: Fungi. For this purpose, she produces data and develops tools for identifying species of this group from various environments, and for studying their roles in climate change adaptation (HFRI MACCIMO).

As a 2026-2027 Fulbright Scholar, Anastasia Gioti will further develop the second direction by undertaking a study of marine fungal communities and functions within Oxygen Minimum Zones (OMZs). These oceanic water columns depleted in oxygen are currently expanding with global warming. OMZs govern key steps of the nitrogen and carbon cycles, processes that influence the Earth’s climate system. The scholarship will allow Anastasia Gioti to visit Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), the largest independent oceanographic research institution in the U.S. One of the most challenging aims of the visit is the development of a computational pipeline for mining fungal identities and functions from OMZ metatranscriptomic data. Anastasia will apply this pipeline on a large dataset of 157 metatranscriptomes, generated from global expeditions of Maria Pachiadaki, Research Scientist at WHOI. The host is an expert in marine microbial ecology and is particularly interested in extreme environments, such as the aphotic zone and OMZs . Besides shedding new lights on the contributions of Fungi to OMZ biogeochemistry, analysis of these datasets will provide educational material for the WHOI-MIT Environmental Bioinformatics M.Sc. program. As a guest lecturer invited and supervised by Maria Pachiadaki, Anastasia will give a practical course on Fungal Bioinformatics, which will strengthen her teaching experience.