Dr Zisis Kozlakidis is the Head of Laboratory Services and Biobanking at the International Agency for Research on Cancer, World Health Organization (IARC/WHO). He is responsible for one of the largest and most varied international collections of clinical samples in the world, focusing on gene–environment interactions and disease-based collections, and director of the LMIC-focused Biobank and Cohort building network (BCNet; https://bcnet.iarc.who.int/). These WHO infrastructures support multinational research efforts in making treatments possible and delivering those to resource-restricted settings. Dr. Kozlakidis has significant expertise in the field of biobanking and has served as President of ISBER (https://www.isber.org/), and is a board member of the pan-EU research infrastructure BBMRI-ERIC (https://www.bbmri-eric.eu/).

Dr. Kozlakidis is a virologist, with a PhD in microbiology from Imperial College London, and an MBA from the Business School, City University of London. He is an elected Fellow of the Linnean Society of London, the Royal Academy of Sciences, UK, and a Turnberg Fellow of the UK Academy of Medical Sciences. He served EOSC as co-chair of the Taskforce on ‘Upskilling countries’; and he also serves as Editor-in-Chief for the peer-reviewed international scientific journal ‘Innovations in Digital Health, Diagnostics and Biomarkers’.

Dr Kozlakidis has contributed to seminal studies in the adoption of innovations into routine healthcare, and their associated financial impacts. He is scientific advisor to the PTEN Research Foundation (UK) and the Digital Health & Literacy Hub (USA). He holds visiting faculty positions in Belgium (School of Public Health, Université Libre de Bruxelles) and the UK (Medical School, City St George’s University of London).