On Friday, hundreds of adoring family members, friends and research collaborators descended on the Skolkovo Technopark to celebrate the graduation of Skoltech’s Class of 2018.
This year’s graduating MSc class in biotechnology included 28 students from Russia and around the world.
The ceremony also honored Maria Sokolova, who successfully defended her PhD dissertation earlier this month, as well as Alexander Martynov who will defend his dissertation in the coming months.
The institute’s top performing students were then honored for their hard work. Julia Gordeeva (Advisor: Konstantin Severinov), Artem Mikelov (Advisor: Dmitry Chudakov), Yulia Mitina (Advisor: Yuri Kotelevtsev) got the award “Best research”, which was given to those students who delivered the best thesis defenses. As one of top performing students, who received excellent grades throughout their time at the institute, Julia Gordeeva has also received “Academic excellence” award.
In addition to student awards, the ceremony honored some of Skoltech’s best loved faculty members. Skoltech students submitted some 322 candidacies. Konstantin Severinov, Georgii Bazykin, Petr Sergiev, Dmitry Chudakov, Yuri Kotelevtsev and Dmitry Pervouchine were included in the long-list of top 20. Only five professors were selected as the crème de la crème. Professor Konstantin Severinov won the top award overall: Skoltech Professor of the year. “I’m really happy [about this award] because Konstantin is an excellent lecturer and a brilliant scientist,” said President Kuleshov.