Biography
Dr. Walter F. de Azevedo, Jr. earned a BSc in Physics (1990), an MSc in Applied Physics (1992), and a DSc in Applied Physics (1997) from the University of São Paulo (Brazil). In his doctoral studies, Dr. Azevedo worked under the supervision of Prof. Yvonne Primerano Mascarenhas (University of São Paulo) and Prof. Sung-Hou Kim (University of California, Berkeley) on a split Doctoral program with a fellowship from the Brazilian Research Council (CNPq). During his first two years at Berkeley, he was under a CNPq fellowship (1993-95). Due to his performance, Prof. S.-H. Kim hired him as Visiting Researcher for the Department of Chemistry, University of California at Berkeley (1995-96). The work developed during these three years at Berkeley resulted in his thesis about the structure of Cyclin-Dependent Kinase 2 (CDK2) in complex with inhibitors (PDB access code: 2A4L) (de Azevedo et al., 1996; de Azevedo et al., 1997). Dr. Azevedo is the first author of both papers, and these publications gathered more than 1,000 citations on the Web of Science.
During 1997-98 he had a postdoc position at São Paulo State University (Unesp) with a Fapesp fellowship. He holds a habilitation degree in Physics (livre-docência) from the São Paulo State University (Unesp)(2004).
In 1998, Dr. Azevedo participated in a research project with NASA that sent proteins to crystallize in a microgravity environment onboard the Space Shuttle Discovery (STS-95). This research had coverage of Brazilian TV networks. He published a book entitled "Docking Screens for Drug Discovery" with Springer Nature in 2019. This book sold 47,000 copies (May 2024) with over 2 million dollars in sales (https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4939-9752-7). In 2020, the Journal Plos Biology ranked Dr. Azevedo among the most influential researchers in the world (Fields: Biochemistry & Molecular Biology and Biophysics).
Dr. Azevedo has vast editorial experience. He is the frontiers section editor (Bioinformatics/Biophysics) for the Current Drug Targets, section editor (Bioinformatics in Drug Design and Discovery) for the Current Medicinal Chemistry, review editor for Frontiers in Chemistry, associate editor for Exploration of Drug Science, member of the editorial boards Molecular Diversity and the Journal of Molecular Structures, and editor of Docking Screens for Drug Discovery (Methods of Molecular Biology)-Springer Nature. He is a reviewer for over 60 high-impact journals, including Nature Communications and Briefings in Bioinformatics.
His research interests are interdisciplinary, with three main emphases: machine learning, complex systems, and computational systems biology. Dr. Azevedo developed several free software to explore the concept of Scoring Function Space. He has over 200 scientific publications about protein structures, computer models of complex systems, and simulations of protein systems. These workers have over 7800 citations in Scopus (h-index: 50 and m-quotient > 1.7), +7300 on the Web of Science (h-index: 48), and +9700 citations on Google Scholar (h-index: 53).