I was born in Minsk (Belarus). I had received MS in physics from the Belorussian State University (Minsk) in 1977, PhD in theoretical physics from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1981, and the Doctor of Sciences degree (habilitation) in theoretical physics from the N. N. Bogoliubov Institute for Theoretical Physics, Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (Kiev) in 1989. Till 1991, I was a senior researcher at the Institute for Oceanology of the USSR Academy of Sciences (Moscow). Since 1991, I was an Associate Professor, and since 1998 a Full Professor at the Tel Aviv University. Since 2015, I am a holder of a personal research chair "Optical solitons" funded by the Tel Aviv University. I have published 1,200+ papers and four books. The total number of citations to my publications exceeds 59,000. My h-index is 92 (Web of Science) / 96 (Scopus)/ 108 (Google Scholar). I am an editor of four major international journals: Physics Letters A, Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, Scientific Reports, and PLOS ONE, and an Editorial Board member of Journal of Optics, Symmetry, Photonics, Optics Communications, and Chaos. I have been an advisor to 31 MS students, 14 PhD students, and 11 postdocs. I am a Senior Member of the Optical Society of America (recently renamed to Optica), and a Foreign Member of the Serbian Academy of Nonlinear Sciences. In 2025, I have received the NSC (Nonlinear Science & Complexity) Lagrange award for lifetime achievement in Nonlinear Physical Science.