UNN graduate and professor, Director of the IAP RAS, Academician Alexander Sergeev elected President of the Russian Academy of Sciences

On September 26, 2017, Alexander Sergeev, Director of the RAS Institute of Applied Physics, Professor of the UNN Faculty of Radiophysics, was elected President of the Russian Academy of Sciences at the General meeting of the Academy. He will take this office after the approval of the Russian President. Alexander Sergeev will become the 22nd President of the Academy of Sciences in its history, the 10th elected President and the third in Russia’s recent history (since 1991).

Biographical details
Alexander Mikhailovich Sergeev was born on August 2, 1955.
In 1977, he graduated from the Radiophysics Faculty of the Lobachevsky Gorky State University specializing in Radiophysics.
In 2003, he was elected a corresponding member, and in 2016, a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is a member of the Physical Sciences Division (Physics and Astronomy) of the Academy of Sciences and a member of the RAS Space Council.
Since 2015, he has been Director of the Institute of Applied Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences. At the same time, he is Head of the Department of superfast processes and Head of the Sector of ultrafast optical processes modeling at the IAP Department of Nonlinear Dynamics and Optics.
Alexander Sergeev is also Professor at the Department of General Physics of the Radiophysics Faculty at the Lobachevsky University of Nizhni Novgorod.
He heads a group of Russian scientists in the LIGO project (in the USA) aimed to detect gravitational waves. In 2016, the project participants were awarded the prestigious Gruber Prize in Cosmology, as well as the Prize in Fundamental Physics (instituted by the Russian businessman Yuri Milner).
Alexander Sergeev is an expert in the field of laser physics, femtosecond optics (optics of ultrashort laser pulses), the theory of nonlinear wave phenomena, plasma physics and biophotonics (investigation of light interaction with biological tissue). Under his leadership, Russia’s most powerful petawatt (1015 watt, or a billion megawatt) laser system was created and new ways of using femtosecond radiation for material processing and medical applications were developed at the IAP RAS.
He holds the following prizes and awards: Russian Federation State Prize (1999), Order of Honor (2006), Russian Federation Government Prize (2012).
We congratulate Alexander Sergeev and wish him every success in his work for the benefit of the Russian science!