A native of Armenia, he moved to Moscow to continue his education in composition at the Moscow Tchaikovsky State Conservatory and graduated with distinction in 2001. A year later after his Master’s Degree he became a Teaching Assistant of Prof. Karen Khachaturian at the Moscow Conservatory and then further taught as a lecturer in Composition and Music Theory. In 2007, he moved to Canada to complete his doctoral thesis at the University of Montreal.[3]