Vasiliki (Lila) Koumandou holds a BSc. in Biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), an M.A. in Biological Oceanography from the University of Washington, and a Ph.D. from the Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge. As a postdoctoral researcher she worked at the University of Cambridge (2005-2010), BRFAA (2010-2011) and the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (2011-2013), and received a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship for her research. Her research interests focus on functional and comparative genomics and molecular evolution, combining molecular cell biology and bioinformatics techniques. She has 29 peer-reviewed publications, 1144 citations and an h-index of 16.