Despoina Kalfakakou is a PhD candidate and works as a research associate in Bioinformatics in Molecular Diagnostics Laboratory of NCSR “Demokritos”. She obtained both her BSc in Computer Science and her MSc in Bioinformatics from the Department of Informatics and Telecommunications at the University of Athens in 2012 and 2015, respectively. Her work focuses on the development of several novel and unique bioinformatics pipelines, that can distinguish phenotypically relevant, disease-causing variants from data sets deriving from Next Generation Sequencing of germline and tumor DNA of cancer patients as well as the analytical interpretation of the generated data. She has developed the Greek-specific variation database CanVaS, open to the scientific community, with data derived from the germline DNA analysis of more than 7,000 Greek cancer patients, for which she has been awarded two awards in national and international conferences. Moreover, she was responsible for the development of the pipeline for the analysis of germline DNA sequencing data, used by the Hellenic Precision Medicine Network on Cancer. She is a visiting instructor at the postgraduate course “Basic Principles and Technologies in Bioinformatics” at National Technical University of Athens. She has 11 publications in high-impact, peer-reviewed journals and has given seven talks after invitation in conferences and training courses.