Dr. Kanavos has previously been Harkness Fellow in Health Care Policy in the Department of Ambulatory Care and Prevention, Harvard Medical School and has held visiting professor appointments at the University of Basel, the University of Delaware and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He is an economist by training, and teaches health economics, pharmaceutical economics and policy, health care financing, health care negotiations, and principles of health technology assessment.

He has acted as an advisor to a number of international governmental and non-governmental organizations, including the European Commission, the European Parliament, the World Bank, the World Health Organization, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the American Association for Retired Persons, and Ministries of Health of over 28 transition, emerging and developing countries.

Current research

Dr. Kanavos' research interests include comparative health policy and healthcare reform, pharmaceutical economics and policy from a developed and developing country perspective, quality and access in healthcare, and socio-economic determinants of health.

He leads the activities of MTRG, which is a research group comprising of 13 researchers and concentrates on interdisciplinary and comparative policy research on medical technologies. The group conducts research on a number of research streams. As part of its activities, MTRG is currently co-ordinating the activities of the IMPACT HTA consortium, an EU H2020 grant, and has previously coordinated the activities of key research grants on Health Technology Assessment (Advance HTA project), on Chronic Disease and a component of Best Practices in Rare Diseases. It has conducted research under the auspices of and participated in the European Medicines Information Network (EMI-net) and the network for the study of rare diseases. It also coordinates the activities of The Patient Academy, an initiative between academia, health care regulatory agencies and patient groups.