Eleni Tzirita Zacharatou

Assistant Professor

From May 2022 to February 2025, Eleni Tzirita Zacharatou was an Assistant Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen (ITU). In March 2025, she transitioned to a new role as Assistant Professor and Head of the Spatial Analytics and Large-Scale Data Processing Group at the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) and the University of Potsdam. Her research focuses on developing data management tools that improve the efficiency of modern data analytics and data science workloads, with an emphasis on spatial workloads.

Before joining ITU, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Technical University of Berlin (TUB) and a junior fellow at the Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data (BIFOLD). She earned her Ph.D. in 2019 from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), where she was advised by Prof. Anastasia Ailamaki. During her doctoral studies, she also spent four months as a visiting researcher at New York University (NYU) with Prof. Juliana Freire. Her dissertation research focused on query processing for spatial and temporal data exploration. She obtained a Diploma M.Eng. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) in 2013.

Eleni is the recipient of a VLDB 2022 Distinguished Reviewer Award and a SIGMOD 2018 Best Demonstration Award.

For more information about Eleni, you can visit her website: https://heltzi.github.io/