Eleftheria Zeggini is a Professor of Statistical Genetics at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. Her research aims to identify novel complex trait loci by carrying out association studies, to develop analytical tools and to understand the molecular mechanisms underpinning disease pathogenesis.

Zeggini was born and raised in Volos, Greece. She received her B.Sc. in Biochemistry from the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST) in 1999 and then completed her Ph.D. in Immunogenetics of Juvenile Arthritis from the arc Epidemiology Unit of University of Manchester in 2003.

After her Ph.D., E. Zeggini undertook a brief statistical genetics post doc focusing on rheumatic disorders at the Centre for Integrated Genomic and Medical Research of University of Manchester.

In September of 2006, she was awarded with the Wellcome Trust Research Career Development Fellowship in order to examine design, analysis and interpretation issues in large-scale association studies.

E. Zeggini, in 2008, became Group Leader of the Analytical Genomics of Complex Traits group of Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute Faculty. There she focused on the genetics and genomics of complex traits, on addressing relevant statistical genetics issues and on primarily cardiometabolic and musculoskeletal phenotypes.

In the last few years, E. Zeggini has published more than 150 scientific articles with breakthrough discoveries of inherited factors that can predispose obesity, hyperlipidemia, osteoarthritis, diabetes and other major diseases.
One of her publications was in “Nature Communications”, an open access journal that publishes high-quality research in biology, physics, chemistry, Earth sciences and all related areas. She published a study that shows that the residents’ genes of the region of Mylopotamos in the Greek island Crete, have a positive mutation that lowers the triglycerides and increases the good cholesterol in the blood.

Eleftheria Zeggini has been awarded with the “Young Investigator Award” by the British Society of Rheumatology in 2002 and by the European League Against Rheumatism in 2003, she received the “University of Oxford Medical Division Research Prize” in 2007, the “Rising Star Award” from the European Association for the Study of Diabetes in 2008 and received the Honorary Professor title from the Department of Health Sciences of University of Leicester in 2013.
From 2015, her work investigates the genetics of complex phenotypic traits in humans using genetic association studies to identify novel disease loci.

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