Yiannis joined the Department of Economics and Finance at Brunel University of London in September 2023 as Professor of Finance. Prior to this he was an Associate Professor of Financial Economics at the University of Birmingham, in the Department of Economics. There, he also served as the Director of the Group for Research in Econometrics and Data Science.
His research interests lie in the evaluation of economic policies and interventions and in developing the appropriate statistical tools that will make these evaluations possible. Methodological interests include the analysis of panel data and of randomized control trials.
He is currently ranking in the top 6% of all economists according to IDEAS. His research has been published in highly ranked academic journals i.e. Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, Journal of Applied Econometrics, Journal of Empirical Finance, Journal of Time Series Analysis, Journal of Financial Stability, Econometric Reviews, Computational Statistics and Data Science, Scandinavian Journal of Statistics etc. In 2025, two of his scholarly articles were recognized in The Stata Journal as the most cited papers over the preceding three-year period, securing the first and third positions in the journal's citation rankings. His PhD students have successfully secured positions at prestigious institutions internationally, spanning both private and public sectors. Notable placements include Tsinghua University, Bank Indonesia, and Kaplan Inc.
Yiannis has secured more than 5 million of external research funding for work on the evaluation of interventions targeted at reducing youth violence and domestic violence. These include a Home Office three-year research grant award of £1,078,377 on “What works Fund, Preventing Violence Against Women and Girls and Supporting Children”, and the "REMEDI - Restorative Services" grant award of 1,580,080 funded by the Youth Endowment Fund. His policy work is being regularly cited by major media outlets such as The Guardian and by policy makers and general and local government officials.