Rate My Professor Dmytro Kozakov

Dmytro Kozakov, known professionally as Dima Kozakov, serves as Professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics at Stony Brook University. He holds an M.S. in Applied Mathematics and Physics from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and a Ph.D. from the Biomedical Engineering Department at Boston University. Before joining Stony Brook University, Kozakov was research faculty at Boston University. At Stony Brook, he has held positions including Assistant Professor and advanced to Professor, with affiliations in the Department of Computer Science, Institute for Advanced Computational Science, Institute for Engineering-Driven Medicine, and Institute of Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery. He has taught courses such as AMS 548: Optimization Techniques in Biomolecular Simulations.

Kozakov's research focuses on the intersection of applied mathematics, physics, and computational biology, developing mathematically elegant, computationally efficient, and physically accurate algorithms for modeling macromolecular structure and function on a genome scale. His applications aim to enhance understanding of biological problems and design therapeutic molecules. Key contributions include the ClusPro web server, recognized as the best for protein-protein docking in the CAPRI competition with over 10,000 users, and the PIPER protein docking program, licensed to Schrödinger. He received the Frey Family Foundation Professorship. His influential publications include "The ClusPro web server for protein–protein docking" (Nature Protocols, 2017), "PIPER: an FFT-based protein docking program with pairwise potentials" (Proteins: Structure, Function, and Bioinformatics, 2006), "How good is automated protein docking?" (Proteins: Structure, Function, and Bioinformatics, 2013), "Performance and its limits in rigid body protein-protein docking" (Structure, 2020), and "The FTMap family of web servers for determining and characterizing ligand-binding hot spots of proteins" (Nature Protocols, 2015). Kozakov's tools and methods have advanced computational structural biology and drug discovery.