**Michail Kotsyfakis**

Michail Kotsyfakis obtained his Ph.D. in the topic of malaria/mosquitoes interaction in November 2004 from the Biology Department, University of Crete, Greece, under the supervision of Professor Kitsos Louis at the Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology-FORTH, Greece. In 2005, he was hired at the NIAID/NIH, USA as a post-doctoral visiting fellow (Rockville, Maryland, USA) where he specialized in tick–vertebrate host interactions under the mentorship of Professor Jose'MC Ribeiro. In 2009, he established his laboratory (Laboratory of Genomics and Proteomics of Disease Vectors) in the Biology Center of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Budweis, Czechia as a recipient of the prestigious Jan Evangelista Purkyne fellowship of the Czech Academy of Sciences. In ˇ July 2016, he was appointed as a Full research Professor in the same Academic Institution.

His group has received support from EU, EMBO Short Term fellowships, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Czech Science Foundation, among others. He has published many papers in prestigious journals, and he has delivered a number of invited talks worldwide. He is an Editorial Board member in five international journals. His current research focuses on using ticks as model organisms to address two fundamental research questions: how to improve our understanding of the basic molecular and biochemical mechanisms which mediate the disease transmission lifecycle of the specific disease vectors and how the mechanisms adopted by ticks to modulate vertebrate host physiological mechanisms may be translated into treatments for human diseases (e.g., related to vertebrate immunity and hemostasis dysfunctions).
