Nikolay V. Dokholyan

Weir M. and Linden C. Tucker Professor of Neurology

Professor of Neurology at the University of Virginia School of Medicine and a researcher in computational biology and biophysics. He holds a B.S. and M.S. in physics from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and a PhD in physics from Boston University (1999), with postdoctoral training at Harvard University. He served at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 2002 to 2018, rising to full professor and holding the Michael Hooker Distinguished Professorship, then moved to Penn State College of Medicine as professor of pharmacology and molecular biology and vice chair for research, before joining UVA in 2025. His lab studies the molecular etiology of neurodegenerative diseases including ALS, Alzheimer's, Huntington's and Parkinson's, and develops computational tools for molecular dynamics and drug design, among them MedusaDock and the AI-based Yuel suite. He is editor-in-chief of Proteins and a fellow of the American Physical Society and AAAS. His work has been cited more than 26,000 times, h-index 91.