Dr Angelos Kassianos holds the position of Lecturer in Health Psychology at the Department of Nursing of the Cyprus University of Technology since January 2022. He holds a degree in Psychology (BSc, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, 2007) with postgraduate and doctoral studies in Health Psychology at the University of Surrey in the UK (2013). In his doctoral dissertation, he studied the relationship between quality of life and behavioral changes in patients with prostate cancer. In addition to his Ph.D, he did the Stage 2 training in Health Psychology Practice and is registered as a Health Psychologist with the UK Health and Care Professions’ Council (HCPC) since 2017. During his PhD, he also worked for 3 months in 2012 as an Intern at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva.
He has worked for years in the UK as a research assistant at the University of Southampton (2013), as a Research Design Services (RDS) Consultant at Imperial College London consulting funding applicants on research methodology (2013) and as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Cambridge (2013-14) and at UCL (2015-2022) coordinating major research projects. For example, in Cambridge he coordinated a program funded by the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) developing an online tool helping with early diagnosis of skin cancer while at UCL he coordinated the development of an online tool (eCREST) funded by the Policy Research Unit (PRU) in Cancer Awareness, Screening and Early Diagnosis, with the aim of preventing cognitive errors that contribute to delaying the diagnosis of serious diseases, such as cancer. In 2015, he won a Fulbright Visiting Research Scholarship and worked for 3 months at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School in the USA studying patients’ priorities during palliative care. He was promoted to Senior Research Fellow at UCL in 2019 until 2022. At the same time, from 2019 to 2022, he started a collaboration with the University of Cyprus, where he secured funding from various bodies such as the Research and Innovation Foundation (RIF), the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC) and the postdoctoral fellowship Marie Sklodowska-Curie (2019-2021).
In 2016, he was a guest speaker at the European Parliament to talk about e-health and the use of mobile applications. In 2017, he emerged as one of the top young European innovative researchers to receive the US Young Transatlantic Innovation Leadership Initiative (YTILI) Scholarship from the US Department of State and in 2018 received the European Health Psychology Society (EHPS) Young Researcher Award. In 2020 he was honored with the Young Researcher Award in the Social Sciences and Humanities by the Cyprus Research and Innovation Foundation.
His research interests extend to a wide range of applications of behavioral sciences in health and public health using a mixed methodology (quantitative, qualitative, meta-analysis). His research falls on the development and evaluation of innovative intervention programs using technology, on understanding the determinants of health-related behaviors such as vaccination, breastfeeding, exercise and smoking, adherence to pharmacotherapy and psycho-oncology. He also investigates teaching clinical reasoning skills through interactive tools using online patient simulations.