Vivek Sharma is an Associate Professor (tenure track) of Computational Biophysics at the Department of Physics, University of Helsinki. He is also a visiting fellow at the HiLIFE Institute of Biotechnology. Sharma’s group focuses on molecular mechanisms of mitochondrial proteins, especially energy generating enzymes, which they study with the state-of-the-art computational approaches and in strong integration to structural biology and biochemical approaches in collaboration. Sharma’s group is one of the largest users of computational resources on top notch Finnish HPC platform provided by the Center for Scientific Computing. By applying long time scale molecular dynamics approaches, Sharma’s group discovered substrate binding sites in mitochondrial complex I ( Front Chem 2019 ), which were later confirmed by high-resolution cryo-EM structures. Large-scale simulations on mitochondrial complexes (Nature 2023 , Sci Adv 2021) in strong coupling to structural biology approaches led to molecular basis of membrane bending and dynamics, and to a novel proton-injection driven proton pumping mechanism. To study subtle aspects such as proton transfer, which is the most fundamental biochemical reaction, quantum chemical approaches are applied in Sharma’s group (Chem Sci 2023). The molecular bases of mitochondrial disease mutation have been studied with multiscale computational approaches (PNAS 2021), leading to novel ideas on targeting mitochondrial complexes against bacterial, metabolic and neurodegenerative diseases. In addition to the main focus on proteins involved in mitochondrial function and dysfunction, Sharma’s research group also actively works on tyrosine kinases and viral proteins.