Dr. Kirill Afonin, PhD

Vice President | Professor at International Society of RNA Nanotechnology and Nanomedicine (ISRNN) | UNC Charlotte

Speaker

Dr. Afonin obtained his M.S. in Chemistry from Saint Petersburg State University, followed by a Ph.D. in Photochemistry from Bowling Green State University, Ohio. Additionally, he acquired a Graduate Certificate in Bioinformatics, Proteomics/Genomics. Over the subsequent three years, he conducted his Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biochemistry at the University of California Santa Barbara. In 2011, he was invited as a Research Fellow at the National Cancer Institute, NIH, where he played a pivotal role in establishing and overseeing an experimental branch within the Computational RNA Structure Group. He started his tenure-track appointment at UNC Charlotte in 2015 and achieved promotion with permanent tenure to the rank of Associate Professor in 2019 and then was further promoted to Full Professor in 2021. Dr. Afonin currently serves as a founding council member and vice-president of International Society of RNA Nanotechnology and Nanomedicine (myisrnn.org). He is an author of over 100 research publications and his accolades include two NIH Fellows Awards for Research Excellence (FARE), a prestigious NIH Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA R35), the First Citizens Scholars Medal, and several substantial grants from the NIH and NSF.