About the future of Russian science: "Snob" tells the success story of the "CASE-IN" champion

When I was a kid, my dad told me that it takes billions of years for light to reach the Earth from the stars. Some of the stars are already gone, but we can see them glowing in the night sky. In this sense, people are surrounded by the past all the time. I was struck by this thought at the time, and I became interested in astronomy and physics. A few years later, when it was time to choose a university and a specialty, I chose metallology, a field related to physics that is especially in demand in the Urals, where I come from.

I enrolled at Ural Federal University, and at first some professors asked me why I needed all this and whether it would be better to just get married. I took their words as a joke. When the teachers saw that I was really interested in the subject, their bias quickly dissipated.

I'm currently studying for a master's degree in titanium alloys. They are used to create implants that are biomechanically more compatible with bone tissue than alloys currently used in medicine. I am working to ensure that the implant and the bone become a single system that the body will not reject. This is a huge project at the junction of fields involving metal scientists, programmers, biologists and geneticists. We have already solved the technological problem and are now working to ensure that our scientific development can be used in medicine.

The peculiarity of modern science is that a scientist must have a business vision and understand the economics of the enterprise for which he is developing a solution. I wanted to participate in the CASE-IN competition precisely because it sets the participants such a task — to propose an engineering design taking into account economic and even environmental factors. And at the same time it gives you the opportunity to feel like a part of something bigger than yourself, to see people with burning eyes and to catch fire yourself.

I am increasingly meeting such people among young scientists in Russia. This gives me hope that the problem of age gap in Russian science will be solved. There are very few specialists aged 35-50 in our country now, because a whole generation of Russian scientists once went abroad. I also thought about moving, but I stopped when I saw that a new young generation was coming to our science.

A source: The snob