Dr. Fotini Paliogianni, a graduate of the Patras Medical School (1984), obtained her Ph.D. from the same university in 1991. She completed her training in Microbiology at the Department of Microbiology, University Hospital of Patras, and she was board certified in Microbiology in 1990. She continued her studies at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Bethesda, MD, USA, as a postdoctoral fellow in Cellular and Molecular Immunology from 1990 to 1993, and she worked as a visiting scientist in the same department during the years 1994, 1995 and 1996. In 1994, she joined the faculty at the Department of Microbiology, University of Patras Medical School, initially as a lecturer and now as a professor of Microbiology–Immunology. Her expertise lies in the fields of the biology of the immune response and the host defense against infection. Her work, using immunosuppressive drugs as a model, first delineated the signal transduction pathways (Ca++ and cAMP dependent) leading to lymphocyte activation. Her more recent work is focused on the innate immunity mechanisms involved in the host defense against P. aeruginosa and Brucella. Her laboratory combines a collection of molecular, genetic, and biochemical approaches to elucidate the role of bacterial products in the regulation of the inflammatory response, the development of innate immunity, and dissect signaling events that are initiated by innate immunity receptors and lead to regulatory/inflammatory cytokine production.
