Dr. Zoe Cournia is a Chemist with over 15 year of research experience. She graduated from the Chemistry Department of the University of Athens in 2001 and received her Ph.D. degree in Chemistry from the University of Heidelberg in Germany in 2006. She then performed post-doctoral studies in computer-aided drug design in the Department of Chemistry, Yale University, and she also became a Lecturer in Yale College in 2009. Since 2009 she is an Investigator at the Biomedical Research Foundation of the Academy of Athens working on discovering new candidate drugs against cancer. Zoe teaches at the Master’s Program “Information Technologies in Biology and Medicine”, co-organized by the Department of Informatics, University of Athens. She has also taught Cosmetology at the Vocational School of Athens and has organized public workshops on the toxicity of chemical ingredients in cosmetics during the Athens Science Festival (http://www.athens-science-festival.gr), which she co-organizes (http://www.athens-science-festival.gr/team_members/zoi-kournia/). For her social and research activities she has been awarded with the prestigious AACR Fellowship for Cancer Research in Angiogenesis, the “Women of Innovation Award” from the Connecticut Technology Council, USA, the Outstanding Junior Faculty Award in Computational Chemistry from the American Chemical Society, USA, and the PRACE Ada Lovelace Award from the EU. She blogs frequently in her “Life is Chemistry” blog, which aims to promote public awareness and understanding of chemistry in everyday life.

Zoe constructs, curates and enriches the ingred.io database with chemical ingredients that are contained in food and cosmetics products.