Sir Christopher Pissarides is the Regius Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, the Professor of European Studies at the University of Cyprus and the IAS Helmut & Anna Pao Sohmen Professor-at-Large at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He is also acting as the head of the Growth Laboratory of the St Pertersburg State University. He was educated at the University of Essex and the London School of Economics (LSE), and he spent the bulk of his career at the LSE. He had long visits in the US Universities of Harvard, Princeton and California at Berkeley.

Sir Christopher specialises in the economics of labour markets, monetary and fiscal policy, economic growth and structural change. He was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Economics, jointly with Dale Mortensen of Northwestern University and Peter Diamond of MIT, for his work on markets with frictions. The emphasis of his work has been the labour market and the theory and policy related to unemployment. Prior to that, in 2005, he became the first European economist to win the IZA Prize in Labor Economics, sharing it again with his collaborator Dale Mortensen. He has written extensively in professional journals, magazines and the press and his book Equilibrium Unemployment Theory is an influential reference in the economics of unemployment that has been translated into many languages.

He is an elected Fellow of the British Academy, the Academy of Athens, the Academia Europaea and several other learned societies, and he is a Lifetime Honorary Member of the American Economic Association. He has been honoured by several universities worldwide with doctorates or professorships. His other honours include the Grand Cross of the Republic of Cyprus (2011), the Trinity College Historical Society Gold Medal for Outstanding Contribution to Public Discourse (2012) and the Kiel Institute Global Economy Prize (2015). In 2011 he was elected honorary citizen of his birthplace Nicosia. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2013.

In 2011 he served as the President of the European Economic Association. Between 2000 and 2007 he was the external member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Central Bank of Cyprus, which brought the euro to Cyprus. In the past he worked on consultancy projects for the European Commission, World Bank and OECD on matters related to employment and macroeconomic policy. More recently he has worked on the economics of the euro area and the European Union and he is frequently quoted in the press on issues concerning European labour markets, the problems of the euro area and Greece in particular and the future of European integration.

He joined IZA as a Research Fellow in August 2001. He received the 2005 IZA Prize in Labor Economics and the 2010 Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences.