Biography

All About Me

I was born in 1974 in Kaliningrad, Russia. My hometown Kaliningrad is the westernmost Russian city on the Baltic Sea. Almost everybody in that region is in some way professionally related to the sea. Even my mother, who was a professor of physics, taught physics to future marine engineers. I used to spend a lot of time at the coast. Watching the sea, how it changes colors and moods during different parts of the day and different seasons is one of my favorite things to do. I missed the sea since I left there. Kaliningrad has a long history. In fact, it has only been Russian during the last seventy years. Before WWII it was a German city, Konigsberg, the capital of East Prussia and the second German city for several centuries. I think that a few reminders of its great history, medieval castles lost in the sand dunes near the sea, old Gothic Cathedral and fantastic tales of E.T.A Hoffman, who was born on the same street as I,  but 200 years earlier, were the brightest impressions of my childhood and made me a romantic dreamer for the rest of my life.  

After I finished the high school in 1991, I moved to St. Petersburg, where I became a student at the St. Petersburg State University, one of the best Russian schools. The school starts counting its history back in the 18th century when it was founded by Peter the Great in 1724. This was not long after the foundation of St. Petersburg itself which was the capital of the Russian Empire until 1917. From the very beginning I was majoring in physics. Doing physics is my family's calling and I am a third-generation physicist. I spent seven years in the College of Physics at the St. Petersburg State University, first as an undergraduate and then as a graduate student. The years I spent there were some of the most interesting years in my life. It was the time of change. The Revolution and collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought so many new things to life. St. Petersburg was at the center of many political events, but what makes it very special is that it always was and is the cultural capital of Russia. I cannot count how much time I spent in museums, exhibits, art galleries, theater, opera, and ballet. All possible sorts of artistic experiments on stage and in exhibition halls represented St. Petersburg’s life of the early and mid 1990s. Everything, which was not even possible to think about a few years earlier, had become a reality. That was the time when theater and especially opera and ballet became my greatest passions. I can tell you a lot of things that none of the guidebooks would mention. Interested in Russian opera and ballet? I can tell you all about that too. 

In 1995 I received my BS degree in theoretical physics and in 1998 my MS degree under the supervision of Professor Alexander K. Shchekin, one of the leading scientists in the Department of Statistical Physics. The same year I moved to Lincoln, Nebraska to continue the research work I started back in St. Petersburg. University of Nebraska had the state-of-the-art computational equipment, which at the time was not available in Russia, and an outstanding research team in Computational Chemical Physics, led by Professor Xiao Cheng Zeng. So, I decided to continue my PhD work at UNL. At the same time, I started teaching in the Department of Physics which is a quite different experience compared to what I used to see in Russian educational system. After several years of being a graduate teaching assistant and a lecturer and receiving several teaching awards, I realized that I want teaching to become an essential part of my job. This is why I decided that my new job should be not in a large public research-oriented university, like UNL, but rather in a small private school like McMurry. Here I can spend most of my time working with students. I hope that my students can learn physics from me, and I can learn more about American culture and American way of life from them. 

I traveled a lot around the United States and almost everywhere I meet wonderful people. The people are what makes this country so special, and I always want to learn more about them. It is here in the United Sates where I met my beautiful wife, Yelena, and built my first family home. It is here where I found so many wonderful friends. This is the place I have chosen to stay in by becoming a US citizen in 2013. Here I am trying to learn more and help others to learn. Here I am looking forward to discovering new things and meeting new friends.