My situation is very simple: I’m an excellent student, I’ve been interested in science since I was 10 years old, I won a silver medal at the Olympiad, I entered MEPhI. I first learned about JINR in 1992 from a lecture by Professor V.L. Aksenov at the Department of Solid State Physics at MEPhI. And when I arrived in Dubna, everything here turned out exactly as Viktor Lazarevich had said, starting with inexpensive and tasty lunches, good computer support and ending with a unique scientific atmosphere. I remember that I then felt shocked against the backdrop of the overall picture of devastation in Russia in the 1990s.
I have been working at FLNP since 1993. The first scientific supervisor was Doctor of Biological Sciences Igor Serdyuk from the Protein Institute in Pushchino. He headed the FLNP small-angle scattering group after the death of Yuri Ostanevich. He suggested the first topic of my scientific activity at FLNP - fractals. The topic is vast, these formations are found everywhere - from nuclear physics to the Universe. Later, the results obtained were used in studying the structure of detonation nanodiamonds using the small-angle neutron scattering technique that was awarded the first JINR prize in 2015. As a member of V.L. Aksenov’s team, I studied solutions of the most interesting objects - fullerenes. A long-time colleague of the FLNP staff L.A. Bulavin (T. Shevchenko University of Kiev) participated in these investigations; he also regularly sent his students to the laboratory. This activity was recognized and the paper “Structure and properties of aqueous solutions of C60 and C70 fullerenes for biological applications” was awarded the first JINR prize for 2018. Another area is the research of ferrofluids that possess many interesting properties. The first experiments on this topic at FLNP were carried out by Maria Balasoiu at the YuMO facility, I participated in the processing of the data she had obtained. Today, a promising area has developed in the use of ferrofluids for the treatment of cancer.
In 1999, I went to Hungary for two years, where I was offered the position of responsible for the small-angle scattering facility. I returned, defended my Candidate’s thesis and afterwards, I worked on my Ph.D thesis that I defended in 2012. Everything is very simple for me - I have a task, I solve it.
– When you give lectures to students, do you somehow additionally encourage them to go into science?
– No, because I try to show them that this is an ordinary job: if it interests you, you do it. There is a romance here that is difficult for the average person to understand. For example, to become a professional, an athlete must train routinely, practice shots or make accurate passes and then he moves to another level and gets excited. Those who get carried away are carried away and it seems to me that no amount of advertising can lure people into science. To move to the next level, you have to sacrifice something and it seems to me that there are few such people. The dropout rate is large and this is probably the most important problem of modern world science.