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Biography
Dr Zisis Kozlakidis, PhD, MBA, FLS, is the head of Laboratory Services and Biobanking at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (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. This WHO infrastructure supports multinational efforts in making prevention and treatments possible and delivering those to resource-restricted settings.
Dr Kozlakidis was awarded the ‘UK Healthcare Innovator’ award in 2018 by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) for his work in viral diagnostics. He is Fellow of the Linnean Society, UK, and a Turnberg Fellow of the UK Academy of Medical Sciences. He is on the editorial board of several peer-reviewed journals, including Frontiers journals (Public Health and Oncology), Innovations in Digital Health, Diagnostics and Biomarkers and others.
Dr Kozlakidis is scientific advisor at PTEN Research, council member of the BBMRI-ERIC pan-European biomedical research infrastructure and past president of ISBER. He holds visiting faculty positions in the UK (Cass Business School, City University of London) and in China (Medical School, Central South University, Changsha, China).
First and foremost, are there any key leadership messages you want to get out to our readership?
In my experience, during such emergency situations, the role of leadership concentrates primarily in facilitating the flow of clear and unambiguous information; to be able to identify which information is critical, identify the direction of travel and then enable the flow of additional information as needs arise. This pandemic is asynchronous, in other words it’s not happening all over the world all at the same time, and some colleagues experience it earlier, and some much later. The leadership challenge lies in distilling the lessons learned from the former and transferring this accrued knowledge to the latter in an timely and effective manner.
Tell us a little bit about your leadership role and how it is changing as a result of the pandemic?
The pandemic has affected directly a number of aspects of work. On …