Athanasios (Nassos) Typas currently leads a research group at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL).
His group works at the interface of systems microbiology and molecular mechanism, developing high-throughput genomics, genetics, chemical genetics and proteomics-based approaches to study bacterial cellular networks, and how bacteria interact with the environment and with each other.
A key area of focus for the lab is antibiotics: their mode of action in the cell, their interactions with other drugs, the modes of resistance and their collateral damage to our commensal flora.
The lab also works on bacterial pathogenesis, profiling and dissecting molecular interactions at the host-pathogen interface, and on the human gut microbiome, studying its interface with drugs and xenobiotics.
Nassos has received a number of awards (NIH Pathway to Independence Award (K99/R00), Sofja Kovalevskaja Award from the Humboldt Foundation) and is a member of the European Academy of Microbiologists. He is an editor and reviewer in journals that publish antibiotic, host-pathogen and microbiome related work, and his group also regularly publishes in these fields.
Nassos is a trained biochemist, geneticist, and systems biologist. He did his undergraduate studies at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, his PhD at the Free University of Berlin and his postdoctoral research at University of California, San Francisco.