Professor Nikolay Dokholyan

Professor Nikolay Dokholyan

Editor-in-Chief: Dr Nikolay V. Dokholyan

Dr. Dokholyan began studying physics and mathematics at the Vecua Physics and Mathematics High School in Tbilisi, Georgia (former USSR). He graduated in 1988 with honors. He then entered the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Department of General and Applied Physics. He received a M.S. with honors in 1994. His master's thesis, entitled "e+e- Anihilation and tb CKM Matrix Element Measurement", was supervised by Dr. Semeon S. Gershtein and Dr. George Jikia (IHEP, Russia), and was published in Physics Letters B.

In 1994, Dr. Dokholyan joined the Ph.D. program at the Boston University Department of Physics and the Center for Polymer Studies under the direction of Dr. H. Eugene Stanley. From 1995 he was working with Dr. Sergey V. Buldyrev and Dr. Shlomo Havlin (Bar-Ilan University) on applying statistical mechanics tools to study repetitive patterns of coding and noncoding regions of DNA. In September 1997, Dr. Dokholyan began a joint work with the company British Petroleum (in collaboration with Dr. Peter King) to study transport phenomena in porous media, and, around the same time he started a collaboration with the research group of Dr. Eugene I. Shakhnovich (Harvard University) on the problem of protein design and folding. Dr. Dokholyan received his PhD in 1999. The thesis, entitled "Applications of statistical mechanics to biological macromolecules", was supervised by Dr. H. Eugene Stanley. In 1999, Dr. Dokholyan received National Institutes of Health NRSA award to work for three years as a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Eugene Shakhnovich at Harvard University Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology. His work was focused on protein folding, design, and evolution.

Dr. Dokholyan joined Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, School of Medicine as an Assistant Professor in 2002. He was promoted as Associate Professor in 2008. Dr. Dokholyan is currently the Director of the Center for Computational and Systems Biology and the Graduate Director of the Program in Molecular and Cellular Biophysics at UNC. Over the past decade Dr. Dokholyan has been working on two main subjects: (i) methodology development to understand and engineer molecular structure and function and (ii) application of these methodologies to understand the etiologies of human diseases and develop therapeutic strategies. Dr. Dokholyan has published 129 per review articles and 11 book chapters.