My parents were teachers, and they managed to instill in me the love of learning. I was also fortunate with the teachers who really prepared us for the intellectual life. Today I understand that although I finished an ordinary school at the district level, but we were taught as future military officers, teachers, engineers, scientists – and it was being done brilliantly. I finished school with a gold medal.
I took one math exam in a written form – and was enrolled at university. The most interesting for me were the major subjects: Physics, Optics, Mathematics and, of course, specialized courses that impressed and fascinated. And this is without fanfare, but true.

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I finished school with a gold medal. If I got “good” at a certain subject, I always protested and tried to re-take because I believed that everything should be done perfectly. I graduated from the institute with honours.
Now I do biology, but at school I was indifferent to it. I was more fond of Literature and Physics, and I even wanted to enter the Department of Physics and Mathematics in Moscow. But my parents said that they would not have enough money to support me in another city, so they offered to choose a university in our native Donetsk. I got insulted and replied that they would apply for me wherever they wanted. My father did not take offense and chose the medical institute for me where I became interested in biochemistry.

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From the early age, I was surrounded by journals and science books, and I have always dreamed of doing astronomy. At school I was an excellent student, and at the university I had satisfactory grades at all kinds of flapdoodle, like Marxism-Leninism (but also at Electrodynamics). Although I am more of a nuclear physicist, what I do now is not too far from astronomy.
I am working on experimental studies of very rare nuclear decays. The most interesting of these is double beta decay, which is even listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the most rare process ever recorded by humanity.

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I did poorly at school, I did not like anything. I liked something from History, a little Literature, some other Humanities that have nothing in common with what I am doing now. I studied for mom to say: “Good boy, you brought you five” –I was not hyped. So, it is quite logical that I did not enter the Institute. But, fortunately, me friends offered me to try myself being a hospital attender at the cardiac surgery department. I just had to see how people work and how they solve complex problems. When you see heart surgery, it cannot but fascinate, so I was absolutely amazed. So much that even now my job involves working with heart.
I have never regretted my choice. Science is the most diverse the person can have in a professional way. New information, idea, thought is like the birth of something new. Love or baby. And in science, the number of such births can be almost infinite.

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I never planned to be a scientist. In my childhood, my environment was not very scientific, but at school I was interested in Biology, Physics, Geography and History. However, biology has always been the dominant one, I realized that it is what strikes me most. I spent a lot of time in nature, looking at birds, plants, reading a lot of books.
When I went to university, I was asked what I wanted to be. For some reason, I was absolutely spontaneous to reply that I want to be a biochemist. They then ask: and what is biochemistry? I say: I don’t know, so I want to learn. It turned out to be a very fashionable department, where about nine students claimed for one place. I succeeded and became one of those who passed the competition. Now I know for sure: it was the right decision because biochemistry is a universal science. Biomedical industry, botanics, biotechnology, virology, microbiology are all based on biochemistry. What is interesting: even seemingly fundamental research in our science can lead to super-practical results that have a positive impact on many people’s lives.

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My parents wanted me to become a doctor, but from childhood I was captured by the space and physics. The Sun in particular – something grand, bright that is always above you and at the same time incredibly far away.
The 1990s were very difficult. The scientists then made money at the side because the salary was symbolic, about $10. Many of my acquaintances started doing other things, went into business, and now they are doing pretty well. But sometimes they still regret leaving physics.

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I did well at school because I had fun. And at university, I got to the most prestigious specialty at the Faculty of Physics. And suddenly I realized that instead of the Napoleonic status, to which I was accustomed to being an excellent student, I was gradually gaining the reputation of a fool and getting “satisfactory”. Subsequently, I managed to improve things somewhat, but I still remember that stroke of misfortune. I think it trained me for life.
It was at university that I had a strong and motivating fear of not succeeding. Only when I made my first major discovery could I calm down a bit.

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My job, like that of any researcher, is to search for new questions or new answers to share them with others. These are the answers to questions of the kind: “How to teach a computer to use images better to learn”. As the question begins not with “How does something work” but “How to teach”, that is, how to do something, my field is more engineering than purely scientific.
Neural Networks are the most effective way to teach a computer right now to do things we cannot formally describe (like recognizing a person in a photo or playing chess), but we can give an example of how to do or not to do it. For instance, voice recognition commands in voice-activated assistants, Tesla autopilot, Google Translate – all these are already working in neural networks, and there will be more.

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My grandmother was a biochemist. When I came to her for the summer, I was accompanied by professional books everywhere: laboratory diagnostics, clinical research, clinical cytology. The latter was the funniest because it was illustrated. I had a lot of fun memorizing some of the complicated words in this textbook without quite understanding it. We travelled a lot those days, and in the trains people loved to ask: “Girl, what is your favourite poem?” And I started to tell them about cell biology. It is funny, but it seems that I was a science promoter back then.
Cell biology is the science which is the base for many things. But now the boundaries between branches of science are very blurred. Cell biology, molecular biology, and genetic engineering approaches are so interspersed that they are difficult to distinguish. Today, in general, most interesting and important discoveries are made in interdisciplinary fields. In recent years, even the Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded for topics related to biology.

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Now I am in space weather, although I studied material science, but never worked with it. This was generally the game of chance. I was interested in aviation, and when it came time for career assignment, I was sent to the Institute for Superhard Materials. At the time, it seemed a very depressing institution – there were no young people at all, only old men who had caught flies having nothing to do. So I addressed my teacher in the mechanics of continuous media, that is, the topic closest to aviation. He said he would take me to his department if I wrote a good report. And since then I have been working at the Space Research Institute.
There are two modes of Institute work: “down time” and “rush job”. That is, either “chillout” when there are no current tasks and you can create some stock for the future or write articles. Or “rush job”, when you have to work 14 hours and go home at 2 a.m.

Read more in the book “Буде тобі наука”.