Nikolai Ivanovich Shakura (Николай Иванович Шакура; born October 7, 1945, in Belarus SSR) is a Russian astrophysicist. He is the head of the relativistic astrophysics department at the Sternberg Astronomical Institute, Moscow University. As a well-known specialist in the theory of accretion disks, as well as X-ray binaries, together with Rashid Sunyaev, he is particularly famous as the developer of the standard theory of disk accretionhttps://web.archive.org/web/20050907134013/http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-56/iss-4/p78a.htmlhttp://www.physics.rutgers.edu/~jackph/2004f/Universe_of_disks.html#toc.