Leondios G. Kostrikis

Leondios Kostrikis (Cyprus) is a Professor of Molecular Virology at the University of Cyprus, an Inaugural Member of Cyprus Academy of Sciences, Letters and Arts and a Member of Academia Europaea. He received his B.Sc. (1987), M.Sc. (1989), M.Ph. (1990) and Ph.D. (1993) degrees from New York University (NYU), United States (USA). This was followed by post-doctoral research at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center of Rockefeller University, USA. He joined Rockefeller University as an Assistant Professor in 1999. He returned to Cyprus in 2003, joining the University of Cyprus. 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 USA. 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 is an Editorial Board member for fourteen international journals and has served on numerous committees for international grant agencies and charities. He is a cofounder of the European Society for Translational Antiviral Research, the founder of the Cyprus HIV-1 Transmission Cohort Study and a scientific member of the global WHO-UNAIDS Network for HIV Isolation and Characterisation. For more than three decades, Prof. Kostrikis has made significant contributions to the study of human genetics in the transmission of HIV-1 and disease progression and the global molecular epidemiology of HIV-1 infection. He is considered as one of the world’s pioneers and top experts in establishing the role of human genetics in the transmission of HIV-1 and progression to AIDS.