Dr. Nikoleta Bellou is a Marine Biologist and holds a permanent Research Scientist position at the Institute of Oceanography at the HCMR. Her main research focus lies in Benthic Ecology working on macro- and micro-organisms and performing in situ field as well as lab experiments on biofouling communities from coastal to deep sea environment. Scope of her research is to investigate and to describe factors that determine these communities, such as light availability, temperature, pollutants etc.  

She holds a Research Biology Diploma from the Department of Natural Science at the Ruprecht Karls University- Heidelberg, Germany (2003) and successfully defended her Phd (Dr. ret. nat.) in 2010 at the Department of Natural Science, Christian Albrechts University-Kiel, Germany. She was the first to deploy long-term experiments for determining factors influencing biofouling communities in deep sea, and her work has been cited as a “groundbreaking study”. In 2010 she was a Visiting Researcher at the CNRS, Dr. Christian Tamburini and in 2012 at the UoV, Prof. Dr. G. Herndl for collaborating on deep-sea biofilm analyses with focus on data gained from pyrosequencing.  

Overall she has 16 years of proven experience in various marine environmental topics through her participation EU-competitive (FP7, H2020), infrastructure, and other funding sources projects. Based on her experience in field-based delivery and project management (Associate Project Manager of FP7-PERSEUS and Co-Coordinator & Project Manager of H2020-CLAIM), she has demonstrated skills to coordinate and work with multidisciplinary teams, has deep knowledge in overseeing portfolios, monitoring the sequence and progress of daily work, troubleshooting problems, ensuring effective project sequencing and inspecting for quality control. 

Moreover in the framework of DAAD and ERASMUS+ funding she had trained and supervised students (Bachelor-PhD), in topics such as shipwrecks hardbottom communities, understanding settling processes of hardbottom communities in various marine environments and many more. 

Dr. Nikoleta Bellou has taken a Sabbatical/Leave of absence. 
She has accepted the invite by the HZG in Germany for a Research position at the Institute of Costal Research. 
The HZG and the HCMR has long-term collaborations.