Prof. Laszlo Prokai

Laszlo 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 University of North Texas Health Science Center. He also is an Associate Member of the Graduate Faculty at the Texas Christian University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Veszprém (now the University of Pannonia), and D.Sc. from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (HAS). Dr. Prokai has maintained an actively funded research program supported by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) and through collaborations with pharmaceutical and chemical companies and is recognized for his work on the discovery and medicinal chemistry of central nervous system agents and on proteomics and mass spectrometry. He has been an invited speaker at numerous national and international scientific meetings, received a Pro Renovanda Cultura Hungariae Visiting Professorship at the University of Szeged in 2002, a Distinguished Guest Fellowship of the HAS at the University of Debrecen in 2022, and a Fulbright Specialist Award he spent at the Semmelweis University in 2023. Dr. Prokai received 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 the International Journal of Molecular Sciences.