Thanos was born in 1975 in Athens. He received a BSc in Chemistry (1999), MSc (2001) and PhD (2004) from the Department of Chemistry, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Dr. Papakyriakou received scholarships for his PhD studies at NCSR “Demokritos”, for post-doctoral studies at the University of Patras (2011, IKY scholarship), as well as two personal grants “Support of Postdoctoral Researchers” from G.S.R.T. (2012) and recently from H.F.R.I. (2018). 

He has worked at the Center of Magnetic Resonance, University of Florence (2000-01 with Prof. Ivano Bertini), at the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of San Diego, California (2012-14 with Prof. Emanuel Theodorakis) and he is the recipient of a European Marie-Curie Fellowship (2016-18) at the Department of Biological Sciences, University of Southampton with Prof. Tim Elliott. 

Since Sep. 2018, he works as a senior researcher at the Institute of Biosciences & Applications, NCSR “Demokritos”. His main research field is the design, synthesis and biological evaluation of bioactive molecules. Our group employs molecular simulations to understand structure-activity relationships and biomolecular function, in conjunction with chemical synthesis of small-molecule inhibitors and biophysical methods to study ligand binding.

His main national collaborators, among others, are Dr. Efstratios Stratikos (Protein Chemistry) and Dr. Dionisios Vourloumis (Biological Chemistry) at NCSR “Demokritos”, Prof. Georgios Spyroulias (Protein NMR) and Constantinos Stathopoulos (Biology of proteins and RNA) at the University of Patras, as well as Dr. Petros Giastas (Protein crystallography, Pasteur Institute) and Dr. Dimitrios Beis and Dr. Constantinos Tamvakopoulos (Pharmacology, BRFAA).