Dimitra Markovitsi

[2] She pioneered studies on the electronically excited states of liquid crystals and made significant advances to the understanding of processes triggered in DNA upon absorption of UV radiation.

Thanks to a scholarship from the French government, she relocated to France, where she earned a "Diplôme d'Etudes Approfondies" (equivalent to a Master's degree) in 1979 on "Energy and Pollution" from the Université Paris VII and, later, a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the Louis Pasteur University at Strasbourg (1983).

[4] Dimitra Markovitsi's areas of research interest include photophysics and photochemistry in the condensed phase, time-resolved optical spectroscopy (absorption, fluorescence), excited states, energy, and charge transfer, charge separation, ionization, radical formation, photodamage, UV-induced primary processes in DNA (excited states, intrinsic fluorescence, electron ejection, oxidative damage) and G-quadruplexes.

[5] She discussed the effect of orientational disorder on the electronic excited states and introduced a model based on the exciton theory and quantum chemistry computations.

Her research revealed the anisotropic character of such events, which are highly dependent on the local DNA environment, rendering the conventional models of chemical kinetics inadequate for describing them.