Alexey  Onufriev  received   his   undergraduate  degree   in biophysics from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology,  the USSR, in 1991.  After graduation, he joined the theoretical biophysics group at  Lebedev   Physical  Institute  in   Moscow,  where  he   worked  on mathematical modeling of ATP synthesis and issues of irreversibility in Quantum Mechanics.  

Following the untimely demise of the Soviet Union, Alexey left for the US to continue as a Ph.D. student at Brown   University,  focusing   on   computational  condensed   matter Physics. He had received post-doctoral training in computational chemistry and molecular biophysics from Duke  University and then from the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego.

In 2003  Alexey  joined Virginia Tech as an assistant professor. Now he is a professor in several departments, including  Computer Science, Physics, Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics. He is also affiliated with the graduate program in Genetics, Bioinformatics,  and Computational Biology.