Author Archives: Eleni Gourgou

On Wednesday, March 29, the Women and Gender Minorities Group of the Mechanical Engineering Department, kindly invited Eleni to participate in one of the very successful Fireside Chats. It is an initiative that brings together faculty and students, to discuss about career paths, life in academia, work and life balance. It was an exciting experienceContinue reading “Faculty Fireside Chat with Eleni, by the Women and Gender Minorities Group”

Eleni will give a talk at the Genetics and Genomics Academy seminar series, North Carolina State University. The event is scheduled for March 6, 2023. We thank Prof. Adriana San Miguel for the invitation. Stay tuned for updates!

The 3rd Latin American C. elegans meeting is taking place in Valparaiso, Chile, March 15-19, 2023. Eleni will give an invited talk on leveraging engineering approaches to decipher learning and memory.  Exciting! Stay tuned for more information. More here on the conference and the conference poster.

On Monday, October 24, Eleni visited Skyline High School of Ann Arbor, invited by the Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) students club. She gave a presentation on her research, and she had a fun and detailed discussion with students about her research, her educational path, her typical week, and her professional activities. Students’ questionsContinue reading “Eleni at Skyline High School, Ann Arbor”

Kubra is presenting a poster at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) 2023 Conference, to be held January 3-7 in Austin, Texas. Our paper is titled “Transdisciplinary exploration of the aging-driven locomotive decline in humans and nematodes”, by Kubra Akbas, Zhaoyuan Zhang, Cruz Donato, Elizabeth Archer, Maria Schiavone, Carlotta Mummolo, and Eleni Gourgou.Continue reading “Our work at the SICB 2023 Conference”

Our group has been awarded a Pathfinder Grant from the University of Michigan Space Institute, to support a pilot study on nematodes’ behavior after exposure to artificial microgravity in the lab. We are excited to continue our space biology research effort!

Eleni presented updates on our group’s work at the 2022 C. elegans Neuro conference, in Vienna, Austria. Our poster was titled “Maze learning and 3-dimensional spatial behavior are affected by age and prior experience”, authored by Lindsay Berardi, Abrielle Fretz, Noah Brooks, Ray Yang, and Eleni Gourgou.  

Our manuscript entitled “3-dimensional arenas for the assessment of C. elegans behavior”, by Cardoza S., Tse L.Y.L., Barton K., and Gourgou E., is accepted for publication in the International Journal of Bioprinting. In this work we present the first iteration of our novel 3D-printer, the Parnon, which can extrude Nematode Growth Medium (NGM), the agar-basedContinue reading “Our paper on 3D-printed hydrogel arenas for nematodes is now accepted for publication!”

Our research on C. elegans maze learning was featured in a recent commentary article in the European Journal of Neuroscience (EJN, May 2022), the official journal of the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies. In it, the authors highlight the significance and impact of our two papers, Gourgou et al, 2021 (experimental work) and Sakelaris etContinue reading “Our research featured in the European Journal of Neuroscience!”

Eleni has been approved for promotion to Associate Research Scientist in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, U-M College of Engineering, effective September 1, 2022.