Konstantin Novoselov — physics (nobel) with roots in the USSR
Konstantin Novoselov is a Russian-British physicist born in Nizhny Tagil (USSR) who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010 with Andre Geim for the isolation of graphene — a single layer of carbon atoms with extraordinary properties. Their method involved nothing more exotic than Scotch tape and a pencil.
Tracing the roots — Nizhny Tagil
Born in Nizhny Tagil in 1974 and trained at Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology before following Geim to the Netherlands and then Manchester, Novoselov is the product of the Soviet physics tradition at its most rigorous. His Nobel Prize — won jointly with a fellow Russian-born scientist at a British university — is a monument to what Soviet scientific education produced and what Britain gained from Russian intellectual emigration.
Nizhny Tagil. At the time, this region was one of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union.