Paraskevi Polymenakou

Paraskevi (Voula) Polymenakou works as one of the volunteer scientists (microbiology of vent sites) onboard the E/V Nautilus.

Paraskevi is a Researcher at the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research (Crete Department, Greece). Paraskevi is exploring marine microbial diversity and functioning of deep-sea basins and extreme environments using state of the art molecular tools (e.g. pyrosequencing). Her work focuses on determining the environmental factors that control microbial community composition in highly diverse deep-sea ecosystems. Paraskevi has worked as a researcher at the Institute of Marine Biology of Crete since 2001 which was further merged with the National Centre for Marine Research (Athens, Greece) and become the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research. She was teaching “Environmental Microbiology” at a Master of Sciences students program at the Department of Chemistry, University of Crete, Greece. She has been involved in several EC research projects (e.g. Biodeep, Hermes) and oceanographic cruises carrying out extensive analyses of the microbial diversity in various deep-sea environments.

Paraskevi graduated from University of Crete (UoC) in 1998 with a degree in Biology, completed her MSc in Environmental Sciences and Engineering in 2000 and her PhD in Environmental Organic Chemistry and Marine Microbiology at UoC in collaboration with the Uppsala University, Sweden in 2005.