Revealing the transformations – past, present and future – of EMBL’s third Director General, Fotis Kafatos

In the late 1960s, while describing the elegant biological and biochemical process of metamorphosis in the silk moth, thereby earning his professorship at Harvard, Fotis Kafatos may have been unaware that his career would itself be remarkably transformative.

Fotis’ father, a Greek immigrant, was determined to educate himself and his family, so Fotis studied both poetry and biology as an undergraduate at Cornell. He went on to become a precocious scientist, gaining a PhD and immediately becoming Professor of Biology at Harvard.

Subsequent professorships and institution building at the universities of Crete and Athens led to Fotis’ selection as the third Director General of EMBL. This, in turn, culminated in his successful metamorphosis to founding President of the new European Research Council (ERC), a position he held until March 2010.

Now, perhaps with the same sense of freedom as the silk moth ‘imago’, Fotis is focusing on affairs close to his heart: malaria research, writing memoirs, family, and starting the new Cyprus Scientific Council. Unlike the fixed and orderly process of metamorphosis, however, Fotis’ commitments require constant juggling!

In November, Fotis received the Robert Koch Gold Medal in Berlin for his life’s work on malaria and insect immunogenomics. He continues his research at Imperial College London with EMBL alumni Dina Vlachou and George Christophides.

Building on his life-long commitment to science education in Greece, Fotis will be returning to Cyrpus to provide advice on research policy and serve on a jury for the Nemitsas Prize, a major new award for young Cypriot scientists worldwide.

In future, Fotis intends to focus his energies on capturing the story of a life’s transformations in his memoirs. In the midst of all these commitments, poetry remains his favourite diversion.

Ellen Dearden