Fotis Kafatos

Fotis Constantine Kafatos (; 16 April 1940 – 18 November 2017) was a Greek biologist. Between 2007 and 2010, he was the founding president of the European Research Council (ERC). He chaired the ERC Scientific Council from 2006 to 2010. Thereafter, he was appointed Honorary President of the ERC. He was also an honorary fellow of the Hellenic Agricultural Academy.

Education Fotis Kafatos graduated from the Lyceum Korais in Heraklion in 1958 and from Cornell University in 1961, where he was mentored by Thomas Eisner and assisted by the Fulbright Program and a scholarship from Anne Gruner Schlumberger. He earned his PhD at Harvard in 1965 for research on entomology, supervised by Carroll Williams.

At the beginning of his career, he contributed to the development of the complementary DNA (cDNA) cloning technology and worked on the mechanisms of cellular differentiation leading to the formation of the eggs in insects. He has particular interest in malaria research and used his knowledge of the genetics and molecular biology of insects to understand how the insect vector copes with the Plasmodium parasite. He also participated in the sequencing of the genome of the mosquito Anopheles gambiae completed in 2002.

He was Assistant Professor and later Professor and Chairman of the department of Cellular and Developmental Biology of Harvard University, Professor of Biology at the University of Athens and at the University of Crete, director of the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology (IMBB) From 2005 till his death, he had been a professor at Imperial College in London. In 2007, he was appointed as the first President of the European Research Council.

Awards and honours Kafatos was a member of the US National Academy of Sciences since 1982 and of the American Academy. He was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 2003 and was also a member of the French Académie des Sciences, the Pontifical Academy and the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO).