Born and raised in Saint Petersburg, Russia, Sasha attended Saint Petersburg State University, where he has developed a strong interest in polar geophysical research. As a graduate student, Sasha attended the University of Texas at Austin as a Fulbright scholar, where he applied marine geophysical techniques to study the history of past glaciations preserved within sedimentary archives of continental margins in Alaska and East Antarctica. During his PhD at Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge, his research focused on geophysical and geological investigations of high-latitude continental margins to reconstruct former ice-sheet behavior and understand long-term ice-ocean interactions in the Arctic and Antarctica.

After completing his PhD, Sasha was awarded the Schmidt Science Fellowship that provided him with an opportunity to pivot into the computational and numerical modelling of ice sheets at Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. His project focused on inferring past climate and ice-sheet histories using numerical thermal models integrated with borehole temperature measurements. 

Thus, Sasha's research interests include ice-sheet evolution and interactions between ice, ocean, atmosphere and solid earth on multiple temporal and spatial scales