Prof. Savvas Christoforidis elected new Director of the Biomedical Research Institute of FORTH | News

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30.08.2022

Prof. Savvas Christoforidis elected new Director of the Biomedical Research Institute of FORTH

Prof. Savvas Christoforidis, Research Director at the Biomedical Research Institute of FORTH, was elected Director of the Institute on June 18th, 2022, by a seven-member Evaluation Committee appointed by the Ministry of Development and Investments, chaired by Professor Efthimios Kaxiras, Department of Physics, University of Harvard.

Further information: https://www.bri.forth.gr/en/research-en/item/117-savvas-christoforidis

Short CV

Savvas Christoforidis graduated from the University of Thessaloniki in 1990 (Degree in Chemistry with Suma cum Laude), got his PhD in Biological Chemistry, Department of Medicine, in the University of Ioannina in 1995 and then moved to EMBL/Heidelberg/Germany for Post-doctoral studies in the field of Cell and Molecular Biology, as a Marie Curie fellow. In 2000 he received a Marie Curie Return Fellowship, to return to Greece as an independent researcher. In 2001 he was elected Lecturer of Biological Chemistry in the Department of Medicine in the University of Ioannina, where he was promoted to Assistant Professor (2007), Tenured Assistant Professor (2011), Associate Professor (2014) and Professor (2018, until to date). Since 2001 he is Affiliated Researcher of the Institute of Biomedical Research/FORTH at Ioannina (https://www.bri.forth.gr/bripeople/en/christoforidis-laboratory), where his group is located. Since 2019, he is the Head of this Institute, while he is a member of the Scientific Council since 2016. In 2002, Savvas Christoforidis received the EMBO Young Investigator award (https://yip-search.embo.org/#/yip/2421). He has participated in 28 successful grant applications, in 11 of which he was the scientific responsible. Three of the grants that his lab received are European Research grants, i.e. a Marie Curie Individual Return grant (2000-2001) and two European Integrated Projects (“Endotrack” and “Pulmotension”, 2006- 2010). His work has been published in high impact Journals, such as Nature, Nature Cell Biology, Cell, Journal of Cell Biology, PLoS Biology, EMBO Journal, Journal of Cell Science, and has received over 4,000 citations (in Scopus, excluding self-citations). The main research interest of the group is to understand the role of intracellular vesicular transport in vascular physiology and the implications in vascular diseases. As an experimental model, the group uses primary endothelial cells, focusing on the spatio-temporal orchestration and the molecular interconnections between receptor endocytosis, signalling and exocytosis and their consequences in vascular homeostasis and in serious vascular diseases. Α new direction of the group is to investigate the role of endocytosis of growth factor receptors in the differentiation of human embryonic stem cells towards progenitor cells and fully differentiated endothelial cells. For more information: https://www.bri.forth.gr/en/researchen/item/117-savvas-christoforidis