Education

• Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry, University of Louisville, Louisville, 2004
• M.S. in Physical Chemistry, Perm State University, Perm, Russia, 1999
• B.S. in Physical Chemistry, Perm State University, Perm, Russia, 1997

Research

My research interests lie in the fields of the origin of life and computational structural and evolutionary biology. As a major theme of my research I am trying to characterize the oldest traceable macromolecules and machines of life, and the earliest discernible connection of the chemical RNA-based world to the biological RNA-DNA-protein world. I am also interested in the relationship between complexity of biological species and the change in the ribosomal structure over the course of evolution. Additionally, I work on the development of computational visualization tools integrated in a web-portal RiboVision, which provides an ability of simultaneous visualization of ribosomal complexes in multiple dimensions, comparison of three dimensional structures of different ribosomes, as well as the comparative analysis of RNA and protein sequences. RiboVision also allows the researchers to map multiple layers of various information (phylogenetic and structural information, experimental or modeling data) onto selected representations of ribosomes.