page_title: Yanis Varoufakis
section_title: Academic career
hierarchical_section_title: Yanis Varoufakis / Academic career
caption_attribution_description: English: Yanis Varoufakis speaking on Subversive Festival 2013 in Zagreb.
context_page_description: Ioannis "Yanis" Varoufakis is a Greek economist, academic, philosopher and politician. He has been Secretary-General of MeRA25, a left-wing political party, since he founded it in 2018. A former member of Syriza, he served as Minister of Finance from January to July 2015 under Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. Varoufakis was a member of the Hellenic Parliament for Athens B from January to September 2015; he regained a parliamentary seat in July 2019.
  Varoufakis was born in Athens in 1961 and attended Moraitis School before moving to the United Kingdom, where he studied mathematics at the University of Essex before attaining a postgraduate degree in mathematical statistics at University of Birmingham and a PhD in economics at Essex. He began a career in academic economics, teaching at the universities of Essex, East Anglia and Cambridge between 1982 and 1988. Following Margaret Thatcher's third election victory in 1987, Varoufakis left the UK and moved to Australia, where he taught at the University of Sydney until 2000.
context_section_description: Between 1982 and 1988, Varoufakis taught economics and econometrics at the University of Essex and the University of East Anglia, and also taught at the University of Cambridge. He did not wish to return to Greece for fear of conscription, and so accepted an offer to lecture at the University of Sydney, where he remained until 2000. From 1989 to 2000, he taught as senior lecturer in economics at the Department of Economics of the University of Sydney, with short stints at the University of Glasgow and the University of Louvain (UCLouvain). Varoufakis, during his time in Sydney, had his own slot on a local television show where he was critical of John Howard's conservative government. He also acquired Australian citizenship.
  In 2000, a combination of "nostalgia and abhorrence of the conservative turn of the land Down Under", led Varoufakis to return to Greece where he was unanimously elected an associate professor of economic theory at the University of Athens. In 2002, Varoufakis established The University of Athens Doctoral Program in Economics (UADPhilEcon), which he directed until 2008. In 2005 he was promoted to full professor of economic theory.
  From January 2004 to December 2006, Varoufakis served as economic advisor to George Papandreou, of whose government he was to become an ardent critic a few years later.
  Beginning in March 2012, Varoufakis became economist-in-residence at Valve. He researched the virtual economy on the Steam digital delivery platform, specifically looking at exchange rates and trade deficits. In June 2012, he began a blog about his research at Valve. In February 2013 his function at Valve was to work on a game for predicting trends in gaming. From January 2013 he taught at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin as a visiting professor. In November 2013, he was appointed guest professor at Stockholm University, Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, to work within game and decision theory at the Institutionen för data- och systemvetenskap (DSV) centre eGovLab at Stockholm University. In 2013, he was appointed the Athens desk editor of the online magazine WDW Review, in which he contributed until January 2015. On 22 January 2015, the International University College of Turin awarded to Varoufakis an honorary professorship in comparative law economics and finance for his extraordinary theoretical contribution to the understanding of the global economic crisis. Varoufakis is a regular contributor to Project Syndicate since 2015.
caption: Varoufakis at Subversive Festival 2013 in Zagreb, Croatia
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