Breaking news!

Resting in Peace in Sunny Oman

"And what sense would there be in buying a car so you could drive on pavement? Where there is pavement there is nothing of interest and where it's interesting - 
there's no pavement."

A. & B. Strugatsky "Monday begins on Saturday"

Finally, I have found a warm place in the world, at least for the next two years. I'll be Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the University of Nizwa, Sultanate of Oman. It is the land where literally Monday begins on Saturday, and a home country of the 1001 Nights, so shall we see how a scientific research would come out in such a place. I will honestly try to keep all my research projects alive, Insha'Allah.

First Things First: Brief Curriculum Vitae

1994: MSc in Organic Chemistry 
from Chemistry Department, Saratov State University , Russia
1999: PhD in Physical Chemistry from the same University:

	1994-2001: Research Associate in Institute of Biochemistry  and Physiology of Plants  and Microorganisms,  Russian Academy of Sciences, Saratov, Russia
	2001-2003: Postdoctoral Fellow  in the laboratory  of Prof. Samuel Cukierman,  Department of Physiology,  Stritch School of Medicine,  Loyola University, Chicago, USA
	2003-2008: Postdoctoral Fellow  in the group of Prof. Amnon Kohen, Chemistry Department, the University of Iowa, USA
	2008-present: Assistant Professor of Chemistry, Department of Biological Sciences & Chemistry, the University of Nizwa, Sultanate of Oman

See full version of the Curriculum Vitae

Courses syllabi

"Structure and functions of biomacromolecules"   
1995-2000, Saratov State University, Saratov, Russia

"Physical Chemistry I"  
Spring 2007, the University of Iowa, Iowa City, USA

Organic Chemistry I
Fall 2008, The University of Nizwa, Oman

Organic Chemistry II
Fall 2008, spring 2009, The University of Nizwa, Oman

Petroleum Chemistry
Fall 2008, spring 2009, The University of Nizwa, Oman

My tutorial on the calculation 
of heavy kinetic isotope effects (KIE).

Research interests (augmented)

Mechanistic Enzymology 
and Isotope Effects

Oxygen metabolism: Flavin oxidases. Copper oxidases. 

Nitrogen metabolism: Nitrogenase. Glutamine Synthetase.

Pharmacological chemistry 
and drug design for orphan diseases

Biomarker for Lou Gehrig's disease (ALS).

Photobiochemistry of human skin. Photochemistry of DNA damage and furocoumarines. Biochemistry of microelements. Tyrosinase enzyme. Drug design for vitiligo therapy.

Biophysical chemistry of proteins 

Structure and function of ionic channels. Enzyme dynamics.

Biocoordination chemistry.

Biological role of  f-elements. Metallo enzymes. Biological catalysis on the binuclear complexes. Biochemistry of copper and vanadium. Nitrogenase enzyme. 

Molecular mechanics 
and quantum chemistry.

Molecular docking (DOCK and AutoDock). Calculation of isotope effects. Solvatation models (Amsol).

Geochemistry and Biogeochemistry.

Isotope biogeochemistry. Biogeochemistry of f-elements. Inorganic hypothesis of oil genesis.

Applied Chemistry: What's Getting My Humble Person in the Media

Expeditions 
and Travel

Crossing the North Polar Circle during ecological assessment of gas deposit territories (September 2000)

More photos from Siberia and other places are on my page.

Programming
and Robotics 

Sometimes one gets to the limits of the existing software. And this would be the right time to write your own programs. This will be fun at the very beginning (tweaking the "Hello, world!") , boring after a while (especially if the project is larger than, say, 100 lines of code), but really exciting and rewarding if you make it all the way to debugging and clean compilation.

I do programming mostly in Ada, in Visual Basic (if I need the interface for an Ada program), and in Prolog (if I need to add a bit of logic to an Ada program). Why so? As an amateur programmer, I enjoy the freedom of choosing the language I consider the best. Too bad I'm not getting paid for that.

Let's see what one can get out of amateur programming...