He held post-doctoral and research engineer positions at Inria Nancy, France (2015-2018) under the ResiBots ERC project and the supervision of Jean-Baptiste Mouret, working on algorithms for efficient damage recovery in robotics. He was a research associate at UCY (2015-2019) and RISE (2019) before forming the LEAR group.

Vassilis has won scholarships for his studies, and has contributed in attracting ~1M euros in funding. He serves as a programme committee member for the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO; Evolutionary Machine Learning track) and as a reviewer for various journals and conferences. His research interests lie in the areas of artificial intelligence and robotics, currently focusing on creating software agents and robots that acquire, retain and improve a diversity of skills. He has published in major journals and conferences on topics related to neural networks, evolutionary algorithms, robot learning, reinforcement learning, multiagent learning, and machine learning applications.