Dr. Zacharias-Faidon Brotzakis is an Assistant Professor specializing in the Physics of Biomolecular Systems. He leads the Biomolecular Modeling and Design group within the Physics Laboratory of the Department of Biotechnology, part of the School of Applied Biology and Biotechnology at the Agricultural University of Athens.
He holds a degree in Chemical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens (2012) and a PhD from the University of Amsterdam (2012–2016), with a focus on biomolecular simulations. He subsequently conducted postdoctoral research for nine years at ETH Zurich (2017–2019), the University of Cambridge (2019–2023), and the B.S.R.C. "Alexander Fleming" (2023–2025). As of 2026, he serves as an affiliated researcher at the "Archimedes" Research Unit for Artificial Intelligence, part of the "Athena" Research Center. The primary research interests of his group focus on understanding the function of biomolecules through the characterization and modeling of their atomistic dynamics, as well as on the discovery and design of compounds with pharmaceutical potential.
To achieve these goals, the group employs and develops computational chemistry and biology methods rooted in physics and machine learning. During his postdoctoral research, he worked on applications involving protein folding and recognition mechanisms, as well as the binding and unbinding of drugs to pharmaceutical targets associated with protein misfolding diseases (such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and diabetes). His teaching responsibilities include courses in Physics, Biophysics, and Physical Methods in Biotechnology. Dr. Brotzakis has published over 35 articles (>1,000 citations, H-index 21) in leading international journals, authored one book chapter, and delivered more than 24 conference presentations.



