Athina got her bachelor’s and master’s degree in Biomedicine at the Karolinska Institute (Solna, Stockholm) where she worked with development of HIV-1 DNA vaccines. After that, she spent one year in Moscow working with in vivo imaging and tumor models in mice. In 2016, she came to Barcelona to join Joan Joseph’s lab at the AIDS Research Unit of Hospital Clínic/IDIBAPS. After defending her thesis on the topic of recombinant BCG-based HIV vaccines, in 2020 she started as a postdoctoral researcher in Julia Garcia Prado’s research group.