Athanasios Papakyriakou
Thanos was born in Athens, Greece (1975). He graduated as a Chemist (1999), then he received his MSc (2001) and PhD (2004) in Bioinorganic Chemistry from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He worked under the supervision of Dr. Nikos Katsaros at the Institute of Physical Chemistry, NCSR “Demokritos’ for the synthesis of metal ion complexes with anticancer drugs and the study of their interaction with oligonucleotides using NMR in combination with molecular modeling. During his PhD, he visited the Center of Magnetic Resonance in Florence (Italy) twice where he worked as a Marie-Curie fellow under the supervision of Prof. Ivano Bertini (2000) and Prof. Claudio Luchinat (2003) for structural studies of nucleic acids- and protein-ligand interactions using NMR and computational chemistry.
In 2005 he joined the laboratory of Prof. Achilleas Garoufis at the University of Ioannina (Greece) as a postdoctoral fellow for the design and structureal study of selective chemical nucleases based on ruthenium(II) peptide conjugates.In 2006 he joined the laboratory of Prof. Georgios Spyroulias at the University of Patras (Greece), where he developed computational methods for the simulation of metalloprotease-substrate complexes and for the docking of CDK1 small-molecule inhibitors.
Since February 2007, he is a postdoctoral researcher at the Chemical Biology Group of Dr. Dionisios Vourloumis at the Institute of Physical Chemistry, NCSR “Demokritos” for the design and modeling of unnatural rigid scaffolds targeting the ribosomal RNA, the design and synthesis of novel VEGFR-2 inhibitors and for modeling EGFR activation throught targeted molecular dynamics. He collaborates closely with the Protein Chemistry Lab of Dr. E. Stratikos for the modeling of the Endoplasmic Reticulum Aminopeptidases (ERAP1 and ERAP2) with peptide-substrates and fluorogenic substrates.
His main research interests comprise computational chemistry (protein and nucleic acids modeling, in silico screening and docking, enzyme-substrate interactions using molecular dynamics) as well as NMR structural characterization of bioactive molecules, protein-ligand screening using spectroscopic methods and synthesis of drug-like small molecules.
For more details download his full CV: [English version PDF]