Introduction
Nektarios Tavernarakis is the Chairman of the Board of Directors at the Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas, Research Director at the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, and Professor of Molecular Systems Biology at the Medical School of the University of Crete, in Heraklion, Greece. He is the Director of the Graduate Program on BioInformatics at the Medical School of the University of Crete, and is also heading the Neurogenetics and Ageing laboratory of IMBB. He is a corresponding member of the Academy of Athens, a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), the German National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina), and Academia Europaea. He has also served as the Director of the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology. His research focuses on the molecular mechanisms of necrotic cell death and neurodegeneration, the interplay between cellular metabolism and ageing, the mechanisms of sensory transduction and integration by the nervous system, and the development of novel genetic tools for biomedical research. He has received several notable scientific prizes, including two ERC Advanced Investigator Grants, and an innovation-supporting ERC Proof of Concept Grant. He is also the recipient of the EMBO Young Investigator award, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel research award, the Bodossaki Foundation Scientific Prize for Medicine and Biology, the Empeirikeion Foundation Academic Excellence Prize, the BioMedical Research Award of the Academy of Athens, the Galien Scientific Research Award, and the Helmholtz International Fellow Award.
Expert
Nektarios Tavernarakis is serving in several evaluation panels/committees for ERC, EMBO, ESF, EU FP7, FCT and NSF, among others. In addition, he has been reviewing proposals for more than 65 different funding organizations, including the HFSPO, NIH, ERC, NSF, EMBO, DFG, and MRC. He has reviewed manuscripts for more than 230 different scientific journals, including Nature, Science, Cell, PNAS, EMBO journals, and PLoS journals. He is serving in the editorial boards of several scientific journals, including the EMBO Reports, FEBS Journal, Biotechnology Journal, Cell Death and Disease (Nature Publishing Group), and others. He has also served as the President of the committee of Experts for the French High Council for the Evaluation of Research and Higher Education (HCERES), Vice-Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board, of the Austrian Academy of Sciences Institute for Biomedical Aging Research, as a Review Board Member for the Leibniz Institute on Aging of the Fritz Lipmann Institute in Jena, Germany, as a Member of the European Partnering panel for the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres, and in several evaluation and/or promotion panels for Research Institute Directors and Faculty, in Greece and abroad.
Fields of expertise: Education, Health and wellbeing, Monitoring and evaluation