George Mavrothalassitis is Professor of Medical Chemistry in the Department of Basic Sciences of the Medical School of the University of Crete. His research activity spans a wide spectrum, from basic biochemistry to the development of animal models for the study of developmental diseases and cancers. His research focuses on the signaling regulation of transcription during normal development and disease and in particular on the role of ETS genes in development and cancer. Dr. Mavrothalassitis received his B.A. in Chemistry and his Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the Department of Chemistry of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. His postdoctoral research was conducted in Molecular Biology at the then newly established Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology of FORTH and he subsequently worked as a visiting researcher at the Laboratory of Molecular Oncology of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) of the USA. His work has been published in international scientific journals such as PNAS, MCB, JBC, EMBO J, Oncogene, Nature Genetics, etc., and he has received scholarships for doctoral and postdoctoral studies from the Hellenic Research Foundation, EMBO and the Fogarty Center of the USA.