Research Associate at the Psychology Lab

I am a Research Associate at the Institute of Applied Biosciences, Center for Research and Technology Hellas (INAB|CERTH) in Thessaloniki, Greece since 2017. I hold a Diploma of Electrical and Computer Engineering and an MSc Degree in Medical Informatics, both from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. I am currently a PhD candidate with the Department of Informatics & Telecommunications at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, working on Natural Language Processing and Information Extraction from clinical notes. From March 2017 until February 2023, I have been a member of the eHealth Lab and have been involved in multiple EU and national R&D projects related with health data security, digital interventions to support prevention, testing and linkage to care for HIV, hepatitis and other STIs, applications to improve drug safety and pharmacovigilance, and participatory design approaches for eHealth applications. Since March 2023, I am a member of the multidisciplinary team of the Psychology Lab at INAB, doing research on Public Health, social determinants of health and health literacy. My main research interests focus on medical text mining approaches and social media analytics and visualisations to improve health literacy, support Active Pharmacovigilance and enable Public Health monitoring. My PhD work entails Natural Language Processing and Information Extraction approaches to extract medication and Adverse Drug Reaction information from free-text Real World Data, mainly clinical notes from EHRs and to enrich them through Knowledge Graphs exploiting various related resources (e.g. EMA’s Summary of Product Characteristics) and terminologies. Regarding social media research, I have developed an interactive visualization application that retrieves, analyses and offers insights on Twitter posts related to Public Health and Pharmacovigilance use cases such as a) an HIV Pre-exposure prophylaxis drug which had just received regulatory approval in several countries, b) Twitter discourse on obesity and Non-Alcoholic Liver Disease and c) Adverse Drug Reaction mentions as an additional Real-World Data source to boost existing PV signals from Individual Case Study Reports (ICSRs), integrated as a separate workspace on the PVClinical Platform. Finally, I am actively involved with participatory design, user requirements engineering and validation efforts throughout my work at INAB and I have implemented technical solutions to support combination prevention efforts for infectious diseases.