Hi there, I’m Ivan.

 

I was born in a small town in northern Russia, called Noyabrsk. It is actually a great place to be born, except for the winter time which lasts for 9 months with a normal temperature of -40C degrees.

 

When I was 16, I left my family and moved to Novosibirsk. There I entered a State University in order to learn applied mathematics. Due to some free time after courses, I joined a Judo/Sambo university section. Two years later, I started doing this sport on a semi professional level, which lasted for more than 10 years in my life. In university I began to be interested more and more in applied science and numerical modeling, in particular. I won 2 times the financial grants for my research work, which was equaly rewarded with multiple prizes on national competitions. In 2011, I defend my MSc thesis and find an interesting PhD position in the Fresnel Institute.

 

Having taken my passport, some clothes (you don’t need a lot of them in Marseille) and my toothbrush, I moved to France. Language was essential, but unfortunately, I did not know a word in French. It was a best moment to start learning it. In 2013, I discovered my second biggest sportive passion - mountain ski, I just loved it! Last year of my PhD was pretty intensive: I taught 2 semesters at the University Aix-Marseille, won a prize for the best research presentation among all the PhD students of last year, and, finally, won a prize for the best PhD thesis from my doctoral school.

 

In october 2014, I moved to Grenoble, to be much closer to the French Alpes and to joint the Atomic Energy Commission Institute (CEA) as a R&D engineer. During 2 years, I worked in a close collaboration with different teams of CEA on various projects in domain of Photonics. This 2 years contract finished very good: I vizited Australia in order to present the results of our work, performed my first real backflip on ski and become a French citizen.

 

In 2016, I came back to Marseille in order to join a young company specializing in development of advanced metamaterials. So at the present time I take a profit again of the southern sun of France.