People

PERISTERA PASCHOU

Professor and Head (Interim) of Biological Sciences
LILY 1-225
Phone: 765-494-1601
Email: ppaschou@purdue.edu

Dr. Paschou is a Professor at the Department of Biological Sciences at Purdue University and Interim Head of the Department of Biological Sciences. She also serves on the leadership team of the Purdue Institute of Integrative Neuroscience and from 2019-2023 was Associate Dean at the Purdue College of Science. In 2019 she was named Showalter Faculty Scholar receiving one of the highest honors at Purdue University, recognizing oustanding faculty who are on an accelerated path to academic distinction. Dr Paschou works at the intersection of Data Science and genomics research. She studies human genetic variation around the world aiming to understand the cause of neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders as well as the factors that have shaped human population structure. Dr Paschou obtained her PhD from the University of Athens in Greece. During her graduate studies she also trained at the University of Oxford Welcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics and the Pasteur Institute in Paris. She did her post-doctoral studies at Yale University where she also trained in Clinical Molecular Genetics, receiving certification by the American Board of Medical Genetics. She has held visiting positions at UCSF, UCLA and the National Institutes of Health. Dr Paschou has established and led multiple international collaborative consortia aiming to identify the genetic basis of neurodevelopmental disease through the analysis of large-scale datasets. She led the EU-funded European network for the Study of Tourette Syndrome with participation of 200 investigators from 23 countries. She has served as Chair of the European Society for the Study of Tourette Syndrome, and she is currently Chair of the ENIGMA-Tourette Syndrome Working Group, bringing together clinicians, geneticists, neuroimaging experts and data scientists from around the world in order to understand brain structure and function in neuropsychiatric disease.