Leontios Kostrikis - Biography#

Leondios Kostrikis is a Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Cyprus and Head of the Laboratory of Biotechnology and Molecular Virology. He was born in and lived his first years in Ashia of the Mesaoria valley in Ammochostos District. He received his B.Sc. (1987), M.Sc. (1989), M.Ph. (1990) and Ph.D. (1993) degrees from New York University, United States. This was followed by post-doctoral research at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center of Rockefeller University (New York) on the molecular virology of Human Immunodeficiency Virus. He joined the faculty of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center as a staff investigator in 1998 and the Rockefeller University as an Assistant Professor in 1999. He returned to Cyprus in 2003 as a Professor (since 2003 Associate and since 2011 a Full Professor) of the University of Cyprus at the Department of Biological Sciences. He was a Fulbright Scholar for his undergraduate studies in the US and received scholar awards from the Elizabeth Glazer Pediatric AIDS Foundation, the Aaron Diamond Foundation and the Patti Cadby Birch Trust in the US. In 2005 he received an Honorary Distinction from the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board for his accomplishments which have contributed to the betterment of the world. He was among the forty Fulbright scholars selected from 250,000 Fulbright alumni from 140 countries since 1946. He has directed over twenty research grants from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), the European Commission, the Cyprus Research Promotion Foundation (RPF) and international charitable foundations.

Leondios Kostrikis is an Editorial Board member for thirteen international journals, and has served on numerous study sections and committees for European and international grant agencies and charities. His laboratory at the University of Cyprus is collaborating with the Cyprus Ministry of Health for the diagnosis of HIV-1 infection and the surveillance of transmission of antiretroviral drug-resistant HIV-1 strains in Cyprus and in Europe. He is a cofounder of the European Society for Translational Antiviral Research (ESAR), the founder of the Cyprus HIV-1 Transmission Cohort Study (CHICS) and a scientific member of the global WHOUNAIDS Network for HIV Isolation and Characterisation. In 2019, he was elected as a Founding Member (Biological Sciences) of The Cyprus Academy of Sciences, Letters and Arts and in 2020, he was elected as Member of the Biosciences Steering Panel of the European Academies Science Advisory Council (EASAC) and as a Distinguished Fellow of the International Engineering and Technology Institute (IETI)