Maria Markidou Georgiadou
Managing Director, Cyprus Seeds
Maria is the Managing Director and Member of the Board of Cyprus Seeds, a non-profit
organization which supports the commercialization of innovative academic research in
Cyprus.
Prior to Cyprus Seeds, Maria was a full-time consultant, for 3 years, with Bank of
Cyprus on matters related to innovation and EU funding. While at the Bank of Cyprus,
she initiated and coordinated for 2 years IDEA, the first Accelerator-Incubator Program
for startups in Cyprus.
Maria has more than 25 years banking experience with Merrill Lynch in New York and
with the Cyprus Development Bank (cdbbank).
She has also worked in the European Commission in Brussels and has many years of
experience as an evaluator for the HORIZON 2020 SME Instrument, which funds the
commercialization of innovative research projects in Europe.
For 12 years, she was the partner of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Cyprus,
contributing to the participation of Cyprus in the annual Global Competitiveness Report
of the WEF.
Maria studied in the US with a Fulbright scholarship and got her Master's degree in
Economics from the University of Oxford, UK.