People, passion and progress

When I’m asked what I do for a living, I say, trying to be funny but mainly to avoid lengthy discussions, that I’m in the business of satisfying my personal curiosity at the company’s expense. A joke it may be, but as ArcelorMittal’s head of global R&D, it is not far from the truth. Learning, discovering, and reinventing tomorrow are the main contributors to my quality of life, as they have been since a very early age.

At the age of eight, living in the Soviet Union, I followed my father to the North of the country, where he took a job near the Bering Sea, the land of bears and Aurora Borealis. The stunning beauty of this amazing, everchanging sight awakened my unabated curiosity for things unknown, things so easily taken for granted. And ever since, I have been obsessed with finding out the reasons why things are the way they are in the world. In short, I was – and am – hopelessly and unconditionally in love with physics.