Yanis Varoufakis has been a Professor of Economic Theory at the Department of Political Economy, Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of Athens since September 2006. He is also the founder of the Democracy in Europe Movement (DiEM25), which he launched in February 2016. His political career includes serving as Minister of Finance of Greece from January to July 2015 and as a member of the Hellenic Parliament representing Athens B from January to September 2015.

Varoufakis has held positions at many prestigious institutions throughout his academic career and was a Visiting Professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas (Austin) from 2013 to 2015. Previously, he taught in various academic positions at the University of Sydney (1990-2002), the University of Cambridge (1987-1988), and the University of East Anglia. He also worked as Chief Economist at Valve Software in Seattle, USA, in 2012. He holds the titles of Honorary Professor of Political Economy at the University of Sydney and King's College London, and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Sussex (2017) and an honorary professorship in Law, Politics, and Economics from the International University College of Turin (2016).

Varoufakis received his PhD in 1987 from the Department of Economics at the University of Essex; he completed his master's degree (MSc) in 1982 at the Department of Mathematical Statistics at the University of Birmingham, and his undergraduate degree (BA Hons) in 1981 at the University of Essex in Mathematical Economics.

His main research areas include Global and European Economic and Financial Crises, Political Economy, and the connections between Game Theory and economic and political philosophy. Varoufakis has made significant contributions to the literature, including numerous books such as Talking to My Daughter About the Economy (2018), Adults in the Room (2017), And the Weak Suffer What They Must? (2016), and The Global Minotaur (2011), which has been translated into ten languages.