Mikhail Gelfand

Mikhail Gelfand is a Russian biologist specializing in molecular evolution, comparative genomics, and systems biology. He has defended PhD in mathematics in 1993, and D.Sc. in 1998. In 2007 Gelfand was awarded a prestigious A.A. Baev Prize of the Russian Academy of Sciences for his “work in computer comparative genomics”. In 2010 Gelfand was elected to Academia Europaea. Gelfand has published >250 papers in recognized international peer-reviewed journals that have been cited >10K times. His Web of Science H-index is 54. Gelfand is or has been a member of editorial boards of several international scientific journals, grant panels (including European Research Council), program committees of international conferences.

Gelfand is a founding deputy chief editor of biweekly Troitsky variant – Nauka, an independent newspaper about the popular science and scientific policy. Gelfand is one of the founders of Dissernet, a network of enthusiasts since 2013 exposing fraud and plagiarism in dissertations and research papers of Russian scientists, politicians, and officials (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissernet). Gelfand has been a member of the Public Council of the Russian Ministry of Science and Education (2012-2016) and Commission on Counteracting Falsification of Scientific Research (2018-2020), and is a member of Commission on Popularization of Science (since 2020) of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Gelfand regularly writes about problems of the Russian Science in international press (Doing science in uncertain times, PLoS Biology 2004; What is to be done about Russian science, Nature 2013; Dynasty Foundation: Russian science loses to politics, Nature 2015). He is also a member of Academia Europaea.