As can be easily induced from my name, I come from the largest country in the world, with the largest number of natural gas reserves, nuclear warheads and prisoners. My beautiful home country is also in the lead with the second highest national debt, second largest number of suicide rates, and world's third highest cost of living. Fun facts about Russia apart, I'm originally from a fairly small city of Dubna, 78 miles to the north of Moscow, where I grew up, went to school and got my undergraduate degree in Linguistics from the University of Dubna.

A native speaker of Russian, I have been in the process of ESL acquisition for the last 19 years. In this period of time I've also acquainted myself with a number of other European languages, and even attempted studying Japanese. Learning languages is one of the most fascinating preoccupations I've tried my hands on. Linguistics is another one. My research interests include Second Language Acquisition and Applied Linguistics, First Language Acquisition, Bilingualism, Slavic Linguistics, Germanic Linguistics, and Romance Linguistics.

I'm currently in my second year of Graduate Assistantship with LINGUIST List and finishing my Master's at the EMU. My two years of work on this crew have been an extremely valuable learning and growing experience both academically and professionally. I'm very grateful to have had this opportunity to work as a GA with LINGUIST List and develop quite a few important and useful skills. Even the bits of programming that I learnt here came as a whole new world to me, which I must admit I'm happy to have had to discover.

One of the things that I really enjoy to do outside of work and school is traveling. I have traveled around 30 states in the US and Canada, visited 12 European countries, made a couple of trips to Japan, and also lived for two years in England. Other things I like to do include skiing, swimming, dancing (just about anything but mostly Argentine tango these days), reading classic and contemporary literature, and watching independent movies.