Dr. Finkelstein is chief of the Laboratory of Protein Physics, Institute of Protein Research, Russian Academy of Sciences, in Pushchino, and professor at the Moscow State University. He received his Ph.D. in biophysics from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and his D.Sc. in physical and mathematical sciences from Moscow University. Dr. Finkelstein has also been an associate professor at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and a visiting research professor at Paris-Sud University and New York University. He has received the State Prize of Russia and a Fogarty award and he was named a Soros Professor. He has received a fellowship from the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, multiple European international grants, and grants from the Russian Foundation for Basic Research and the Russian Academy of Sciences. In 2008, he was elected a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He was first awarded an HHMI International Research Scholar grant in 1995. This is his third HHMI award.

Alexei Finkelstein is interested in various aspects of protein folding, structure, and action. His laboratory studies, both theoretically and experimentally, the thermodynamics and kinetics of protein folding, unfolding, and misfolding, including chaperone-induced folding, membrane-induced unfolding, and amyloid formation. He also develops estimates of force field potentials for fold recognition, homology modeling, and drug design.