Walter Filgueira de Azevedo Junior

"Let the light of science end the darkness of denialism." DOI:10.2174/092986732838211207154549.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). 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 the first two years of his stay at Berkeley, he was under a CNPq fellowship (1993-95). Due to his performance during these first years, Prof. S.-H. Kim hired him as Visiting Researcher for the Department of Chemistry, University of California at Berkeley (1995-96). The work developed at Berkeley resulted in his thesis about the structure of Cyclin-Dependent Kinase 2 in complex with inhibitors (PDB code: 2A4L) (https://www.rcsb.org/structure/2A4L) (de Azevedo et al., 1996)(https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.93.7.2735); (de Azevedo et al., 1997)(https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1432-1033.1997.0518a.x). Dr. Azevedo is the first author of both papers, and these publications gathered more than 1,000 citations on the Web of Science (https://www.webofscience.com/wos/author/record/581112). During 1997-98 he had a postdoc position at São Paulo State University (Unesp) with a Fapesp fellowship (https://bv.fapesp.br/pt/bolsas/75932/determinacao-de-estruturas-de-proteinas-por-tecnicas-de-difracao-de-raios-x/). 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 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9IFiQNY8mE). In 2019, he published a book entitled "Docking Screens for Drug Discovery.". This book sold 59,000 copies (August 2025) 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 (https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3000918). Dr. Azevedo works as an editor of several journals. Among them, he is the frontiers section editor (Bioinformatics/Biophysics) for the Current Drug Targets (https://benthamscience.com/journals/current-drug-targets/editorial-board/#top), section editor (Bioinformatics in Drug Design and Discovery) for the Current Medicinal Chemistry (https://benthamscience.com/journals/current-medicinal-chemistry/editorial-board/#top), review editor for Frontiers in Chemistry (https://loop.frontiersin.org/people/1278875/overview), associate editor for Exploration of Drug Science, member of the editorial board of Molecular Diversity (https://www.springer.com/journal/11030/editors), 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 emphases: machine learning, complex systems, and computational systems biology. He developed the concept of Scoring Function Space (https://doi.org/10.2174/0929867324666170623092503) and created several software to explore this hypothesis (https://github.com/azevedolab). He has over 200 publications about protein structures, computer models of complex systems, and simulations of protein systems. These publications have over 8,400 citations in Scopus (h-index: 50, m-quotient > 1.7), +8,000 on the Web of Science (h-index: 50), and +10,000 citations on Google Scholar (h-index: 55). Dr. Azevedo is a professor at the Federal University of Alfenas. (Fonte: Currículo Lattes)