Despina Michael-Grigoriou

Short Bio

Despina Michael-Grigoriou is an Associate Professor at the Department of Multimedia and Graphic Arts of the Cyprus University of Technology (CUT), where she serves as the Vice-Chair of the Department. She is also the founder and director of the Microsoft Computer Games and Emerging Technologies Research Lab - GET Lab ([getlab.org]), established with seed funding from Microsoft in 2012. She joined the University in 2012 and has served as Lecturer (2012–2015), Assistant Professor (2016–2021), and, since 2021, in her current rank. Prior to joining CUT, she was a postdoctoral visitor/researcher at the EVENT Lab, University of Barcelona (2011), which specializes in experiments within Virtual Reality systems, and a Lecturer (2009–2011) at the University of Nicosia. She obtained her PhD in Computer Graphics from the Department of Computer Science, University of Cyprus (2010).

Despina has received several awards and distinctions, including but not limited to: Anita Borg Scholarship awarded by Google (2008), nomination of her PhD dissertation for the Best PhD Thesis Award of the Eurographics Association (2011), Best Paper award (VSMM 2014), another Best Paper award (VS-Games 2014), certificate of a journal Top-Downloaded paper (CAVW 2018-2019), Best Audience Poster award (ICAT-EGVE 2020), Female Personality of CUT award (2023) and others. Her work has been published in leading scientific Q1 journals  and A* international conferences (e.g. Scientific Reports (Q1 journal), Virtual Reality (Q1 journal), Frontiers in Virtual Reality (Q1 journal), Computer Graphics Forum (Q1 journal),  Educational Technology and Society (Q1 journal), IEEE VR (A* rank)). Her work has been featured several times, with most recent highlights to include: her published research work presented at BBC Radio 4 (2020), featuring at MDPI Virtual Worlds journal’s front page (2025), marked as having more downloads and views than 97% of all Frontiers articles (Frontiers, 2025) and marked as ‘extremely highly cited compared to other publications in the same field’ (Dimensions, 2024 & 2025).

Despina is an Advisory Board member of the European Association of eXtended Realities (2025–today), elected by the General Assembly of the association. She is also an appointed, by invitation, member of the Eurographics Virtual Environments Working Group (2019–today) and an appointed, by invitation, member of the ICAT Steering Committee (2018–today), serving the oldest communities in Virtual Reality in the world. She also serves the research community by being a regular reviewer for leading scientific journals (e.g., Computers in Human Behavior, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, Virtual Reality journal, Frontiers in Virtual Reality), scientific conferences (e.g., IEEE Virtual Reality, EuroXR, IEEE CoG), and research proposals (e.g., EU ERC grants), participating in editorial boards (e.g., Frontiers in Virtual Reality Review Editor), and being the chair or a member of organizing and program conference committees (e.g., EuroXR 2025 - Lead Program Chair, Scientific Track; EuroXR 2024 - Lead Program Chair, Applications Track; EAI ArtsIT 2024 - Program Committee; EuroXR 2023 - Program Chair, Applications Track; IEEE CoG 2022 - Program Committee; ICAT-EGVE 2018 - Lead General Chair & Local Organizing Chair). She has delivered various invited keynote talks and other presentations at international fora, including talks given in Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong, Canada, the USA, France, Spain, the Czech Republic, Greece, and Cyprus.

Despina has participated in more than 20 European and local funded projects on Virtual Reality and related fields, coordinating many of them and playing an instrumental and leading role in the acquisition of grants totaling over 50 million euros. She is a core initiator and the founding coordinator, on behalf of CUT, of the H2020-Teaming-RISE project, which led to the establishment and operation of the CYENS Centre of Excellence, where she led the Visual Science research pillar (2018–2023), and a founding member of the SCRC Social Computing Research Centre, where she also serves as a member of the board (2019–today). She has also served in many other managerial positions, including CUT Coordinator of the first inter-university program in Cyprus, the MSc in Games Design and Development (2012–2020), Centre of Excellence CUT Coordinator (2014–2021), Centre of Excellence Deputy Scientific Coordinator (2015–2023), and University Senate member (2018, 2023–2024, re-elected 2024).