Dr. Vassili N. Kouvelis is an Associate Professor at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He received the B.Sc. in Biology and the Ph.D. in Microbial Genetics and Biotechnology from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in 1994 and 2002, respectively. He served as a Lecturer (2009-2015) and an Assistant Professor (2015-2024) at the Department of Biology, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Furthermore, he is a member of the Society for Molecular Biology & Evolution, the Panhellenic Union of Bioscientists, the Mikrobiokosmos, the Federation of European Microbiological Societies, the American Society for Microbiology, and the Genetics Society of America. His research interests are:
(a) the study of the interaction between mycophilous and endophytic-entomopathogenic fungi with their hosts through genomic, transcriptomic, and metabolomic analyses, with the ultimate goal of biotechnological exploitation of these organisms for the protection and optimization of agricultural crops and (b) the study of mitochondrial genomes to trace the evolutionary trajectory of these genomes from the initial endosymbiotic event of α-proteobacteria to the present-day mitochondrial genomes in the Kingdom Fungi.
