Victor Yakovenko is a Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and was a recipient of the Sloan Research Fellowship and the Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering. He is a theoretical physicist with more than 30 years of research in electronic properties of various materials. In addition, he joined the emergent econophysics movement in 2000 by publishing a paper "Statistical Mechanics of Money". Over the next twenty years, his ideas became increasingly popular and initiated an expanding wave of follow-up papers by many researchers around the world. The work by Yakovenko has also been covered in the media, such as Science magazine, New York Times Magazine, American Scientist, New Scientist, Science TV Channel, Australian Financial Review, and the UK Engineering and Technology Magazine. Yakovenko has given more than 100 invited talks on this subject. He was a recipient of a grant from the Institute for New Economic Thinking.
Victor Yakovenko graduated from Moscow Physical-Technical Institute with M.S. in 1984 and completed his Ph.D. at the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics, Moscow in 1987, where he was subsequently employed as a Research Scientist. In 1991 he became a Postdoc at the Department of Physics, Rutgers University. In 1993 he joined the University of Maryland, College Park as Assistant Professor and became Associate Professor in 1999 and Full Professor in 2004.