Alexander Tsirlin graduated from the Department of Chemistry, Moscow State University in 2006. He obtained his PhD in 2009 and continued his research as Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids (Dresden, Germany). In 2012 he became a group leader at the National Institute for Chemical Physics and Biophysics (Tallinn, Estonia). In 2014 he received the Sofja Kovalevskaya Award and established an independent research group at the University of Augsburg, Germany. Since 2022, he is professor of experimental physics at Leipzig University, Germany.