Pharmacy Perspectives - Graduation 2019 - 19

G R A D UAT I O N 2 0 1 9

Stefanos Aivazidis, who is graduating with a PhD, smiles for a photo with his wife, Zacharoula Kopelia.

STEFANOS AIVAZIDIS:
GOING FAR FOR PHD
BY SANDY GRAHAM

magine you've applied to a PhD program and you find out that
you have one shot at an in-person interview with the director. It's
tomorrow morning and eight hours from your home.
If you are Stefanos Aivazidis, you get on a bus at 10 p.m. in Serres,
Greece, and travel all night to Athens to meet Vasillis Vasiliou, PhD,
then director of the doctoral toxicology program at the University of
Colorado Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences.
Stefanos arrived with an hour to spare, exhausted.

"I couldn't sleep on the bus, I was so
nervous," he recalls.
Stefanos (he prefers going by his
first name) was accepted and joined
the CU Pharmacy PhD toxicology
program in 2014. He will receive his
PhD at May's graduation.
At CU Pharmacy, Stefanos worked
in the lab of James Roede, PhD, the
toxicology program's associate director,
trying to identify possible mechanisms
involved in protein aggregation and
toxicity in Down Syndrome models.
Stefanos has begun postdoctoral
work at Northwestern University's
Feinberg School of Medicine in the
laboratory of Joseph R. Mazzuli, PhD, as
assistant professor of neurology. Stefanos
will study protein aggregation and clearance mechanisms in neurons derived
from skin cells of patients with neurodegeneration disorders, such as Parkinson's
disease, through induced pluripotent
stem cell (iPSCs) transformation.
Stefanos joins his wife, Zacharoula
Kopelia, in Chicago. The couple met
while taking the Graduate Record
Examination in Greece and married
last September in Chicago. Zacharoula,
a structural engineer, earned a master's

degree at Columbia University while
Stefanos was in Colorado.
"I'm really glad I went to CU,"
Stefanos says. "Not only are the professors excellent and always there to
help, but the students in the program
are really close, which is not common.
We hang out together and help each
other. That's what I like."

DEPARTMENT OF
PHARMACEUTICAL
SCIENCES PhD GRADUATES
MAY
2019

Mohammed Assiri
· Toxicology
Stefanos Aivazidis
· Toxicology

DECEMBER
2018
Nasser Alsaleh
· Toxicology
Deepanshi Dhar
· Toxicology

Aditya Gandhi
· Pharmaceutical Sciences
Katherine Sullivan
· Pharmaceutical Sciences, Pharmaceutical Outcomes Research track
David Tabano
· Pharmaceutical Sciences, Pharmaceutical Outcomes Research track

www.ucdenver.edu/pharmacy

http://www.ucdenver.edu/pharmacy

Pharmacy Perspectives - Graduation 2019

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