Dr. Ioannou was born in Cyprus and he completed his studies in Germany, where he graduated from the medical school Universitätsmedizin Göttingen. He then specialized in Cardiac Surgery at the Heart Center Brandenburg.

Prof. Dr. Tzanavaros Ioannis is the Director of the Cardiac Innovation Center of Apollonio Hospital and he comes from Polis Chrysochous. After his military service he studied medicine at the National Kapodistrian University of Athens. He began his specialty at Cottbus, an academic hospital of the German Cardiac Surgery Centre in Berlin. He completed his specialty in cardiac surgery in 2007, while in the same year he successfully completed his doctoral dissertation on the surgical treatment of arrhythmias. He became a consultant of Cardiac Surgery in Stuttgart in 2010 and since 2012 he is a certified congenital heart surgeon and paediatric cardiac surgeon. He was the deputy director of congenital heart surgery at the University Clinic of Hannover, after which he become the director of Paediatric Cardiac Surgery and congenital heart surgery in Stuttgart, Germany in 2016. He has performed over 3000 heart surgeries encompassing the entire range of Cardiac Surgery from premature infants weighing 400 grams up to the elderly. He is a pioneer in the field of minimally invasive congenital cardiac surgery.