Alex Leo Kolodkin, Ph.D.

Dr. Alex Kolodkin is a Professor of Neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Deputy Director of the Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences. He holds the Charles J. Homcy and Simeon G. Margolis Professorship. His research is focused on understanding how neuronal connectivity is established during development to generate functional circuits.  As a postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Kolodkin discovered the first semaphorin gene in the grasshopper and then determined that semaphorins are a phylogenetically conserved protein family from flies to human. At Hopkins, his laboratory has investigated the roles played by neuronal guidance cues and their receptors in the regulation of neuronal guidance cues and their receptors in the regulation of neuronal morphology and the elaboration of neural connectivity in a wide range of neural systems, both in the fruit fly and in mice. His current work is focused on understanding mammalian visual system development and function, and also on investigating how neural connectivity established in the neocortex.

Dr. Kolodkin received his B.A. in Biology and Religious Studies from Wesleyan University in Middletown CT. He earned his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology and Genetics from the Institute of Molecular Biology at the University of Oregon in Eugene, OR. He completed his postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Kolodkin joined the Johns Hopkins faculty in 1995.

Dr. Kolodkin serves on the editorial board of Neuron and on the review boards of several Federal and Private Foundation funding agencies. His work has been recognized with various awards, including the Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in 2004, the Pradel Research Award of the National Academy of Sciences in 2016, and in 2020 he was elected a Member of the National Academy of Medicine.