Please call me Sasha (short for Alexander in Russia). I am from St Petersburg and was there until I finished University in 2011 . Math circles have been a part of my life since I was 8: a lot of math olympiads in school, IMO 2006 (silver), then teaching at my school no. 239. 

Graph Theory was one of my favourite subjects in math olympiads, so I chose it for my PhD at Steklov Institute 2011-15 . At the same time, I got inspired by a lecture of Stanislav Smirnov (IMO 1986-87, Fields Medal 2010), changed my subject to Probability Theory/Mathematical Physics and did a PhD with him in Geneva 2011-16.

I kept coming back to Russia to teach in a math summer camp in Kirov Oblast  and opened a Math circle in Geneva . Then I spent 3.5 years doing research at the Universities of Tel Aviv and Fribourg (CH). Since March 2020, I am on a six-year research position in the Probability group at the University of Vienna.

My taste in Mathematics is not far from what I liked in the olympiads - solving beautiful problems and constructing combinatorial bijections, with a physical/real life intuition that one can easily explain.