Nicoletta Nicolaou
Associate Professor | PhD programme Director
Profile
Nicoletta Nicolaou is an Associate Professor and the PhD programme Director at the University of Nicosia Medical School.
Dr Nicolaou holds a BSc (Hons.) in Cybernetics & Control Engineering, and a PhD in Cybernetics, from the University of Reading, UK, as well as an MSc in Criminology from the University of Nicosia, Cyprus. She is also an alumna of the EU FP7 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship programme, having conducted her fellowship at Imperial College London, UK (2014-16).
Her research focuses on the interactions between the central, autonomic, and enteric nervous systems in both health and disease, exploring mechanisms such as the gut microbiome, brain-gut axis, and vagal pathways. Her primary expertise lies in biomedical signal processing and machine learning, applied to the field of neuroscience. Her main research interests include investigating the interplay of nervous system activity during anaesthetic-induced (un)consciousness, sleep, epilepsy, neurodegeneration, and Autism Spectrum Disorders. Additional interests include medical assessment and, more recently, the emerging field of Neurocriminology – the intersection of neuroscience and criminology.
She is currently the Principal Investigator for the study titled “Effect of probiotics on cognitive functioning of patients with early Alzheimer’s Disease,” funded by the Alzheimer’s Association (Grant #: AARG-NTF-22-928616). In December 2024, she was appointed as a member of the Cyprus Review Bioethics Committee for Biomedical Research and Clinical Trials on Medicinal Products of Human Use.