Vilen Mitrofanovich Strutinsky (Russian: Вилен Митрофанович Струтинский; 16 October 1929 – 28 June 1993) was a Soviet nuclear physicist.

[1] Strutinsky graduated from secondary school in 1946 in Odesa (after his family during World War II had been evacuated to Yekaterinburg).

In 1966, Strutinsky made a breakthrough concerning the problem of incorporating shell effects into nuclear deformation energies higher than those of the liquid drop model (LDM).

[2] In 1967–1970 Strutinsky worked at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen as the head of the group of physicists that was set up to develop his theory of deformed nuclei.

They showed that the shell structure of nucleonic spectra is a characteristic feature of any finite quantum system.