In the spotlight: our projectcoördinators

Meet Chris Talbot

Chris Talbot is Professor of Radiotherapy Genetics in the Leicester Cancer Research Centre and Department of Genetics & Genome Biology at the University of Leicester. He leads an inter-disciplinary research group which focusses on understanding and predicting side effects from radiotherapy. The group’s work including carrying out genome-wide association studies for acute and late side effects, investigating the effect of time-of-treatment and circadian rhythm and building predictive models using statistical and machine learning approaches.

Chris did his BSc at Imperial College in London and his PhD at Washington University in St Louis as an external student of the University of London. His early work and PhD project was on the genetics of Alzheimer disease, which included finding the first genetic mutations that cause the disease. Postdoctoral research work was carried out at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics at the University of Oxford, which centred on finding genes for anxiety using mouse genetics. Chris started as a Lecturer in Medical Genetics at the University of Leicester in 2001. Since 2008 his research has focussed on radiotherapy side effects, through a long-standing and fruitful collaboration with Prof Paul Symonds, now Emeritus Professor of Clinical Oncology. Dr Talbot was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2016 and Professor in 2024.

Prof Talbot was deputy co-ordinator and work package lead for Biomarkers in the EU-funded REQUITE project, and is now chair of the REQUITE legacy committee. He is currently chair of the Association for Radiation Research and co-chair of the Radiogenomics Consortium.

Meet Iordanis Kousopoulos

Iordanis Koutsopoulos is a Professor at the Department of Informatics of Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB) since 2021. He obtained the Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Athens, Greece, in 1997, and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Maryland College Park (UMCP) in 1999 and 2002 respectively. He has been with AUEB since 2013, and prior to that was with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Thessaly. During his sabbatical in Fall 2012, he was a visiting research scientist with Yahoo! Research Labs, Barcelona, Spain. During the summer of 2005, he held a visiting scientist position with the University of Washington, Seattle, USA. In 2015, he was awarded a European Research Council (ERC) runner-up award for the project "RECITAL: Resource Management for Self-coordinated Autonomic Wireless Networks". 

He has received 3 best-paper awards for papers in the IEEE ECOFEC workshop 2019 (held in conjunction with IEEE INFOCOM), in the ACM HotPost workshop 2016 (held in conjunction with ACM Mobihoc), and in the ACM WinTECH 2013 workshop (held in conjunction with ACM Mobicom). He has been PI, co-PI, and technical coordinator for several Horizon Europe, H2020, and FP7 European projects and for national projects. He currently serves as the Director of the Graduate Program on Computer Science. His research interests are in the broad area of network control and optimization and applied AI, with applications to wireless networks, edge computing and analytics, and the smart energy grid.