Laszlo Prokai PhD, DSc

Dr. Prokai is the first Chair in Biochemistry endowed by the Houston-based Welch Foundation, one of the United States’ oldest and largest private funding sources for basic research, at the UNT Health Science Center. He started his academic career as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Pharmaceutics and the Center for Drug Discovery of the College of Pharmacy at the University of Florida in 1991. During his tenure there, he rose in rank to Professor in the Department of Medicinal Chemistry, held an Affiliate Professorship at the Department of Chemistry, was a Joint Professor of the Department of Anesthesiology, was a Scientific Advisor of the Biotechnology Program, and was Member of the McKnight Brain Institute.

Dr. Prokai joined the University of North Texas Health Science Center in 2005. Dr. Prokai also is an Adjunct Professor and Associate Member of the Graduate Faculty at the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry of Texas Christian University. Dr. Prokai has maintained an actively funded research program supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as well as through collaborations with pharmaceutical and chemical companies and is recognized nationally and internationally for his work on the discovery, bioorganic and medicinal chemistry of central nervous system agents, and on neuropeptides, proteomics, and mass spectrometry.

Dr. Prokai has been an invited speaker at numerous national and international scientific meetings, received a Pro Renovanda Cultura Hungariae Visiting Professorship at the Department of Medical Chemistry, University of Szeged (Hungary) in 2002, and a Distinguished Guest Fellow of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences at the University of Debrecen (Hungary), in 2022. He was the recipient of the 2017 Wilfred T. Doherty Award of the Dallas/Fort Worth Section of the American Chemical Society (ACS) and the 2017 Southwest ACS Regional Award. He currently serves on the Editorial Boards of numerous scientific journals including Current Medicinal Chemistry and the International Journal of Molecular Sciences.