Dobrotin, Nikolai Alexeyevich (born 18.06.1908) is a Soviet physicist and an academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Kazakh SSR (1967). Born in Penza. Graduated from the university in Rostov-on-Don (1929). Since 1935 he has worked at the Physical Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences (deputy director in 1951–67), and in recent years also at the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Academy of Sciences of the Kazakh SSR.
His main work concerned the physics of cosmic rays. Together with D. V. Skobeltsyn and G. T. Zatsepin he discovered (1949) and studied electron–nuclear showers and the nuclear cascade process (USSR State Prize, 1951), and discovered asymmetric showers. He studied the mechanism of the interaction of high-energy particles and the process of the formation of secondary particles, and established a characteristic feature of the multiple production of secondary particles through the formation and decay of clusters.