Kingston University senior lecturerer Paraskevi Goggolidou talks about genetics

My name is Evi Goggolidou and I joined Kingston University six months ago.
I am a lecturer in genetics here and I am involved in a number of
undergraduate courses which focus on genetics, such as
the flow of genetic information, molecular and cell biology
and concepts of human genetics.
I am also supervising MSc projects in cancer biology and
biomedical science, so I am not only interested in teaching and lecturing
I am also interested in research.
As you can tell from the long name, I originally come from Greece.
I have been living in the UK for the past 12 years
so I came here to do my undergraduate studies in molecular genetics.
At the time when I was finishing high school I was really
interested in Dolly the sheep and the concepts of gene cloning
and that brought me to this country. Since then I have done a
PhD in the University of Oxford on alpha thalassemias.
I was mainly interested in the genetic aspect of disease and
then I moved to the Medical Research Council in Harwell
where I did a postdoc on animal models of various human diseases.
Since then I have joined Kingston University as a lecturer in genetics.
I personally find genetics very interesting, and that is because it
answers or it attempts to answer many questions about human diseases.
What we do in the modules at Kingston is try and address the biochemical,
biological and molecular biology processes that give rise to different
procedures, phenomena and diseases, so in the modules we are doing,
we're doing mendelian genetics which explains the patterns of inheritence
and that can tell you whether you are suffering from a disease,
whether there is a chance you may be suffering from a disease,
and what that means about your everyday and general wellbeing.
We are also doing more molecular stuff, so trying to explain
what individual genes do, how they work, how they are regulated
and what that really means to what makes you yourself.
As far as research is concerned my main interest is ciliopathies
which is actually a group of genetic diseases that can have various
phenotypes, so a ciliome is actually a structure in a cell
that projects out of it; it is similar to a flagella in a spermatozoa
and what it does is it can either detect and pick up signals
from the environment, or it can help in the movement and
better definition of the cell and it is known that when that structure
is abnormal in the cell, the cell cannot function properly
and this would give rise to a number of diseases, such as
neurological diseases, obesity, you can have rejection of the embryo
in the uterus and all sorts of developmental defects.
A degree in biomedical science can offer you a number of different possibilities
as a future career path. Obviously my background is academia, so one choice
is for you to finish your degree and then go for a PhD and carry on
further researches/studies and end up perhaps a lecturer at Kingston.
Other alternatives, if you are not into university environments,
would be for you to work for a public health organisation such as
the World Health Organisation, or be involved in pharmaceutical companies
or even go to such things as the city, because a degree is not just
offering you a short term path, it can actually ... it opens a whole new world
so you don't have to stick to molecular and medicine or
biomedical science if you don't want to.
In terms of Kingston University, we've got a broad area of expertise
so you've got people who work on cancer biology,
you've got people like me who work on cell biology and animal models of
human diseases. You've got a broad range of colleagues that are
interested in microbiology and parasitology and the interesting thing
about such a university is that we don't only combine expertise in
biological sciences, we can also combine expertise in biological science
with medicine, maths, engineering and computing, which is an up and
coming area of genetics.
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