He graduated with a B.S. in mathematics, summa cum laude, from Moscow State University in 1993 and received his doctorate, also at Moscow State, in 1995 under Alexandre Kirillov and Grigori Olshanski.[3] He is a professor at Columbia University. He previously was a professor at Princeton University, where he was awarded a Packard Fellowship (2001), the European Mathematical Society Prize (2004), and the Fields Medal (2006); an assistant and associate professor at Berkeley, where he was awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship; and an instructor at the University of Chicago. He was going to rejoin the faculty at Berkeley in the summer of 2022, but decided to stay at Columbia, teaching a graduate class in the fall of 2023.