Penelope has an educational and professional background in both civil and common law systems. She studied law at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (LLB, Ptychion), at the University College London (UCL) (LLM in International Business Law) and at the University of East Anglia (UEA) (LLM in International Commercial and Competition Law and PhD in Competition and Public Procurement Law). In order to perform her PhD studies, she was awarded in an open competition the UEA Postgraduate Studentship by the Faculty of Social Sciences Graduate School. Her PhD thesis is entitled "Combatting Collusion in EU Public Procurement".
She also holds a Diploma in Comparative Law (1st cycle) from the International Faculty of Comparative Law in Strasbourg and a Postgraduate Certificate in Management of Shipping Companies from National and Kapodestrian University of Athens.
Before joining academia, she was a trainee lawyer in Greece and then the head attorney in Administrative and Family Law department of a leading law firm in Cyprus. She is a qualified lawyer (not currently practising law) in both Greece and Cyprus and an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
In 2016, she was selected by the University of Cambridge, Department of Sociology, to work as a Research Assistant on DIGIWHIST, an EU Horizon 2020 funded project. In 2019, she was a Visiting Scholar at Georgetown Law School in Washington D.C, United States of America, with a grant of $10,000 USD awarded by the American Bar Association (ABA) Section of Antitrust Law.
