Athanasios C. Thanopoulos

Athanasios Thanopoulos is a European civil servant of Greek nationality who has served as Deputy Director-General at Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union, since December 2025. Eurostat, also known as DG ESTAT, is formally part of the European Commission. Prior to that, Thanopoulos was President of the Hellenic Statistical Authority for almost a decade and, from 2022, he was Chairman of the European Statistical System (ESS) Partnership Group, whose objective is to gradually build up the conditions for providing comparable statistics at EU level through partnerships between Eurostat, the national statistical institutes of member states and other national authorities.

Education Athanasios Thanopoulos completed his four-year bachelor's degree in economics at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in 1997. The following year, Thanopoulos moved to Toulouse to study at the Toulouse School of Economics, affiliated to the Toulouse Capitole University. He obtained a Diplôme d'études approfondies (DEA), a high-level research master's degree, in mathematical economics and econometrics in 1998 and a European Diploma in Advanced Quantitative Economics the following year. Thanopoulous completed his PhD in Economics at the economics department of the University of Pittsburgh.

Career Athanasios Thanopoulos worked as a researcher at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens from 2000 to 2001, also giving lectures at the National Technical University of Athens. In 2000, he also joined the Greek environment ministry as an economist. From 2001 to 2006, he returned to the US to work as a lecturer and teaching fellow at the University of Pittsburgh, where he had undertaken his doctoral studies. In 2010, returning to Athens, he became an assistant professor at the National Technical University and an adjunct professor at the National and Kapodistrian University. He remained in this role from 2010 to 2016, before his appointment as President of the Hellenic Statistical Authority. In 2018, he became a visiting professor at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, lecturing in statistics and modelling within the mathematics department.

On 16 December 2025, he was appointed Deputy Director-General at ESTAT, the first time a Greek national has held such a senior role in the organisation.

His research has been published in international journals and focuses on behavioural public finance, dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models, social insurance design, public debt sustainability and quantitative analyses of taxation.

Thanopoulos speaks English and French alongside his native Greek.