Andre Geim - Early Years

Early Years

Andre Geim was born to Konstantin Alekseyevich Geim and Nina Nikolayevna Bayer on 21 October 1958. Both his parents were Russian German engineers. "I suffered from anti-Semitism in Russia because my name sounds Jewish". In his autobiography, Geim also states that his great-grandmother was Jewish while the entire other family was of Russian German origin. Both, his father and parental grandfather had spent many years of their lives as prisoners in Sibieria in Stalins Gulag. Geim has one brother, Vladislav. In 1965, the family moved to Nalchik, where he studied at an English-language high school. After graduation, he applied to the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute. He took the entrance exams twice, but was not accepted because of his ethnicity. He then applied to the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), where he was accepted . He said the students had to work extremely hard: "The pressure to work and to study was so intense that it was not a rare thing for people to break and leave, and some of them ended up with everything from schizophrenia to depression to suicide." He received an MSc degree in 1982, and in 1987 obtained a PhD degree in metal physics from the Institute of Solid State Physics (ISSP) at the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) in Chernogolovka. He said that at the time he would not have chosen to study solid-state physics, preferring particle physics or astrophysics, but is now happy with his choice.