Dr. Thanos Kossyvakis
Dr. Athanasios Kossyvakis received his postgraduate studies in Immunology at Imperial College in UK. During his PhD studies (School of Medicine, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens), focused on the antiviral resistance profile of human influenza viruses.
Since July 2022, he joined the Central Health Council within the Greek Ministry of Health as a public health expert.
From March 2004 to June 2022, he served as the Laboratory Supervisor of the National Influenza & Other Respiratory Viruses Reference Laboratory of Southern Greece at the Hellenic Pasteur Institute in Athens, an affiliated member of the Pasteur Institute International Network. He also served as an ECDC Operational Contact Point (OCP) responsible for strategic and operational collaboration on technical and scientific issues for influenza virus surveillance and public health functions.
Since 2021, he is a member of ECDC Viral Respiratory Disease Network Coordination Committee (DNCC). DNCC Committee members support further development of the ECDC disease work and networks, by providing important but non-binding advice to ECDC SARS-CoV-2 and Human Influenza Disease Programmed with respect to all aspects of its work including surveillance, prevention, and control or any other technical, epidemiological, or scientific aspects, thus enabling each disease network to improve its effectiveness and added value.
In addition, he works as an External Technical Assessor for Medical Laboratories for the Hellenic Accreditation System S.A., E.SY.D. His duties include: α) Evaluation of quality and competence of medical laboratories using qPCR, Next generation sequencing (NGS), Sanger sequencing and pyrosequencing technologies and β) Review and assessment of the laboratory quality management system according to ISO 15189:2012 and 17025 standards.
From 2014 to August 2021, he was a member of ECDC coordination committee on its work on influenza and respiratory viruses. The key role of this committee is to advise the European Reference Laboratory Network for Human Influenza (ERLI-Net).
From June 2017 to September 2018, he was appointed as a Postdoctoral Research Scholar (Full-time) by the David Geffen School of Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of California, Los Angeles. This appointment sponsored by UCLA was for the purpose of advanced studies and research in HIV – immunopathogenesis using the humanized mouse model. From 2023 he is serving Gain Medical Group as the Senior Scientific Advisor/Consultant.
