Charalambos (Bambos) Kyriacou obtained a Psychology degree in Birmingham, UK in 1973 and graduated with a PhD in behavioural genetics from Sheffield in 1978. Between 1976 and 1978 he was a Demonstrator at the Dept Psychology, Edinburgh University. He moved to Brandeis in 1978 to work with Jeff Hall where he initiated a side-project on Konopka’s period mutants in the context of fly courtship and has been working on biological rhythms ever since. In 1981 he moved back to Edinburgh as an independent research fellow and in 1984 was appointed to a Lectureship at the Genetics department in Leicester, UK.
During this time he was involved in the early molecular work on the identification of period with Hall and Michael Rosbash. He maintained his collaborations with Hall and Rosbash for 15-20 years while developing his own group at Leicester where he focused on evolutionary and population genetics aspects of clock genes in Drosophila with Rudi Costa from Padova, and former postdocs Ezio Rosato, Alex Peixoto and Eran Tauber.
He performed the early circadian transcriptomic and proteomic studies on mammals with Mick Hastings (LMB) and with Hastings and David Wilcockson (Aberystwyth), developed the crustacean, Eurydice pulchra as a model for studying circatidal rhythms. He also uses circadian phenotypes to study magnetoreception in Drosophila with Ezio Rosato and Richard Baines (Manchester).
Finally he collaborates extensively with Flaviano Giorgini (Leicester) on Drosophila models of neurodegenerative disease. He has coordinated a number of network grants from the EU and has PI’d many others, served as Head of Department and chaired his department’s Athena Swan committee for many years. He has been a member of various committees for the Academy of Medical Sciences and the Royal Society and is on the editorial boards of a number of journals.