Speaker Bio

Theodoros I. Vassilakopoulos is currently president of the Scientific Council of the National Public Health Organization. He is Professor of Pulmonology – Critical Care Medicine at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and Adjunct Professor at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. Since 2022 he is director of the 2nd Pulmonary Department and the coordinating director of the Henry Dunant Hospital Intensive Care Units. He has served as director of the 3rd Department of Critical Care of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens at the Eugenidieon Hospital, consultant pulmonologist at the Laiko Hospital, and head of the Intensive Care, Pulmonary and Respiratory Failure Units of the 1st Critical Care Department of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, at the Evangelismos Hospital. Prof. Vasilakopoulos received his medical degree and doctorate from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and completed postgraduate training at Boston University, Boston, USA, at the Laboratory of Respiratory Physiopathology (Laboratoire Physiopathologie Respiratoire) at the University of Aix-Marseille in France and at the Royal Victoria Hospital and at the Meakins-Christie Research Laboratories, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. Prof. Vasilakopoulos has worked as a member of the editorial board of the scientific journals American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine (official journal of the American Thoracic Society) and Intensive Care Medicine (official journal of the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine), of which he was also an associate editor. He is currently associate editor in the International Journal of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, the Canadian Respiratory Journal & in Frontiers in Physiology. He has served as Chairman of the Long Range Planning Committee and the Acute Critical Care Group of the Respiratory Intensive Care Assembly of the European Pulmonary Society (ERS), a member of the Critical Care Assembly of the American Thoracic Society (ATS), as a Program Committee Member and as a Planning Committee Member. In Greece, he was a member of the National Council for Research and Technology (ESET), and special and general secretary of the Hellenic Thoracic Society (HTS). He is an active member of the National Public Health Committee of the Ministry of Health Prof. Vassilakopoulos practices the entire spectrum of pulmonology and intensive care, bronchoscopy and sleep disorders. The research of Prof Vassilakopoulos and their team focuses mainly on the physiology and pathophysiology of the respiratory system, both in humans (healthy volunteers, patients, ventilator-dependent patients) and in animal models in which he studies the consequences of increased airway-bronchospasm resistances (observed in severe exacerbations of COPD and asthma) in the lungs, diaphragm and respiratory center.