Sergei L. Dudarev was born in Belarus, grew up in Tbilisi, Georgia, and studied mathematical physics at the Moscow Engineering Technical University, receiving MSc and PhD degrees in 1983. In 1989 he was awarded a Moscow Komsomol Prize for outstanding scientific achievements and in 1991 a Royal Society Research Fellowship. He moved to Oxford, UK in 1992, becoming a Fellow of Linacre College, Oxford in 1995. From 2005 S.L. Dudarev leads computational materials science research at UK Atomic Energy Authority, and the European programme in modelling and simulation of radiation effects in fusion materials. He held visiting professorships at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and the University of Hong Kong, and a distinguished visiting lectureship at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He is an author of a treatise on Electron Diffraction and Microscopy published by the Oxford University Press in 2004, and over 270 papers on subjects spanning the theory of electron diffraction and imaging, methods of electronic structure calculations, and mathematical models for fusion reactor materials. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, and a member of editorial boards of Physical Review Materials, Journal of Nuclear Materials, and Nuclear Fusion.