Athanasios Typas

Athanasios Typas

Group Leader & Senior Scientist, European Molecular Biology Laboratory

Nassos is a trained biochemist, geneticist, and systems biologist. He did his undergraduate studies in Chemistry/Biochemistry at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, PhD at the Free University of Berlin with Regine Hengge and postdoctoral research at UCSF with Carol Gross. Since 2011 he has been running his own group at the EMBL Heidelberg, and since 2020 he is a Senior Scientist. His group develops systematic quantitative approaches and combines them with mechanistic work to study how bacteria interact with the environment, the host and with each other. The overarching goal is to identify new principles and mechanisms that govern such interfaces, and to shed light into the vast dark matter encoded in bacterial genomes. Key focal areas of the lab are on antibiotics, host-pathogen interactions and the human gut microbiome. Nassos has received a number of awards (e.g. NIH Pathway to Independence Award, Sofja Kovalevskaja Award, VAAM Research Award, Liliane Bettencourt Prize for Life Sciences), is an ERC-investigator, and is a member of the European Academy of Microbiologists and of EMBO.