“I had a painful childhood. But it was also beautiful.”
Artemis Kontou is not one to look for sympathy. She lost her father at twelve years old and grew up watching her mother do everything alone. Somewhere in the middle of all that, Artemis learnt to find strength in challenges, direction amidst difficulty. “I learnt how to dream,” she says, “to be curious, a researcher, even as a kid.” A few decades and several reinventions later, that is still, at the core of it, what she is doing.
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Artemis Kontou is a researcher and entrepreneur leading AI research initiatives focused on real-world applications in healthcare, while developing entrepreneurial projects across various technologies. She is the creator of the HarmoraMethod, a membership-based platform exploring personal growth and inner alignment through music and guided practices. She mentors startups within innovation and accelerator programmes.
She has never been one to follow a script for the sake of blending in.
“I was always driven by doing what matters to me, and doing something that has an impact on the world,”
she says.
That took her from a Mathematics degree in Nottingham, to a Master’s in Applied Meteorology and Climatology in Birmingham, to the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission in Ispra, Italy. Surrounded, she says, by scientists from all over the world, a community that made her more sensitive to the planet she was living on. Then back to Cyprus, then a fellowship at AkzoNobel, then a PhD in London. Then Imperial College for a postdoctoral position. In her mind, this was the apex of academic success, there in a city leading top research initiatives. She thought she might stay there for years; she had found the place to build a career.
That is, until personal reasons brought her home. For one or two years after returning, she thought she had failed, that she would never become the academic she had planned to be. “I was dreaming that my life would take me to Cambridge or Oxford,” she says. It took time to see that what life gave her was, in many ways, more.
She joined KIOS Research and Innovation Centre of Excellence at the University of Cyprus, where she eventually built her own team working on AI and healthcare. That team is, she says with pride, mostly women, in a field still largely dominated by men.
The team is building smart tools for the Ministry of Health to improve pandemic surveillance and disease monitoring, and developing a One Health system that connects veterinary services, the Ministry of Health, the surveillance unit, and medical entomology, the mosquitoes that carry disease. She is also a board member of MEDTL Medical Technologies, a startup developing tools to detect around thirty types of heart disease through ECGs.
She also joined the Nicosia Chamber of Commerce and Industry, where she is pushing to change the legal framework to better support startups and close the gap between early-stage companies and the larger industry.
“We need to build the culture first and then the infrastructure. There are many cases around Europe where they try to build and mimic Silicon Valley, where they build the buildings, but there’s no startup ecosystem culture to support that,”
she says.
The buildings come last. The culture comes first. And Artemis is ready to put the first (and last) brick.
Artemis Kontou is a guest on The Future Makers: Women Building Cyprus. The full episode, including her reflections on failure, the Harmona Method, and what Cyprus needs to build to become a real innovation hub, is available to watch now.
The Future Makers Podcast is a series of in-depth conversations about how future-makers are made, in Cyprus and beyond. Host Annetta Benzar sits down with people who are a leading force in our shared future and looks past the titles. Together, they travel back to the people and moments that influenced them, walk through the choices and challenges they are living through now, and look ahead to the futures they are trying to build.
The first season, Women Building Cyprus, follows women whose lives and decisions are changing what this island can be.
A production of The Future Media.
