Maria Derkacheva

Working within the Research Faculty Office, Maria Derkacheva manages and enables the development of strategic research programme grants within the Earlham Institute. She works closely with the strategic programme leads, research faculty leaders, post-docs, the genomics pipeline project managers, executive assistants, and the shared support service teams such as Contracts and Finance.

Maria obtained Master in Biology degree from the Saint-Petersburg State University, Russia. During this time, she carried out research at the Institute of Cytology focusing primary on protist biology and symbiosis. During her Master, Maria got the first experience of working abroad in Oulu, Finland. 

This experience inspired her to do her PhD abroad, and she moved to Zurich to do her PhD in the field of chromatin biology. Maria obtained her PhD in Life Sciences from ETH Zurich in September 2013. Her research led to several high impact factor publications and reviews. During her PhD time, Maria worked as well as researcher at SLU Uppsala, Sweden.

In 2013-2015 Maria carried out research in INRA Versailles in France working on meiosis in Arabidopsis. After taking maternity leave in 2015-2016, Maria won a prestigious Marie Sklodowska-Curie individual fellowship to study PAMP-triggered immunity in the Sainsbury laboratory in Norwich, UK. In April 2021, Maria joined Earlham Institute as strategic research project manager.