Lazaros Belbasis

Lazaros is an intermediate transition research fellow funded by the Oxford British Heart Foundation Centre of Research Excellence since August 2024. In this fellowship, he leverages large-scale multi-omics data from population biobanks to study molecular pathways and identify potential drug targets for ischaemic stroke. Alongside research, Lazaros actively contributes to undergraduate and postgraduate teaching within the department. In recognition of his teaching excellence, he has been awarded an Associate Fellowship of the Advance Higher Education, and the 2024 Oxford Population Health Teaching Award. He is also a research member of the common room at Kellogg College. 

Lazaros joined the Oxford Population Health in August 2022 after being awarded an Oxford Population Health Early Career Research Fellowship. In this fellowship, he integrated proteomic and transcriptomic data within a Mendelian randomisation framework to identify proteins involved in neurological diseases, including Alzheimer’s Disease and Multiple Sclerosis. For this work, he received a Reviewer’s Choice Award at the 2023 Annual Meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics. 

Lazaros obtained his medical degree (2015) and PhD in Epidemiology (2020) from the University of Ioannina. His doctoral research focused on environmental risk factors for neurodegenerative disorders, and was funded through a PhD scholarship by the Greek State Scholarships Foundation and a Research Fellowship by the Hellenic Academy of Neuro-immunology. He also trained as a General Practitioner and family medicine physician in Greece, receiving his Certificate of Completion of Training in 2021. Prior to joining the department, Lazaros worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the QUEST Center for Responsible Research, part of the Berlin Institute of Health at Charité, where he focused on meta-research and research reproducibility.