After graduating with an Honor Diploma and Gold Medal from the Chemistry Department of Moscow State University, he worked for five years as a researcher in that institution's Division of Inorganic Chemistry. He then worked as a Senior Researcher at the Samsung SDI R&D Center in the Republic of Korea, for which he was awarded "Best Foreign Researcher", before obtaining his Ph.D. from the Paul Scherrer Institute and University of Bern with a focus on the chemical properties of Super Heavy Elements and their homologues.