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.
10 Facts About Fotis Kafatos
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Fotis Kafatos earned his PhD at Harvard in 1965 for research on entomology, supervised by Carroll Williams.
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Fotis Kafatos was an influential Greek biologist, having had a pivotal role in triggering the interest of the Greek government for Science, with the establishment of the Faculty of Biology in the University of Athens, the Faculty of Biology in the University of Crete and the IMBB in Heraklion.
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Fotis Kafatos 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.
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Fotis Kafatos participated in the sequencing of the genome of the mosquito Anopheles gambiae completed in 2002.
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Fotis Kafatos was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 2003 and was a member of the French Academie des Sciences, the Pontifical Academy and the European Molecular Biology Organization.
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Fotis Kafatos was awarded the Louis-Jeantet 25th anniversary prize in 2008, the Robert Koch Medal in Gold in 2010, the BioMalPar.
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Fotis Kafatos was a recipient of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany and of the Greek Order of the Phoenix, as well as other awards and honorary degrees in Greece and elsewhere.
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Fotis Kafatos was the son of Constantine and Helen Kafatos, had two brothers named Antonis and Menas, and lived until age 18 with his family in Heraklion, Crete, Greece.
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Fotis Kafatos married Sarah Niles in 1967 and they had two daughters, Helen and Zoe Myrto, and four grandchildren.