Fyodor started his research career in the year 2000 in the lab of Eugene Koonin at NCBI, NIH after his BA degree. The main focus of his research was evolutionary genomics and bioinformatics. In 2003 Fyodor continued on to University of California at Davis graduating with an MA degree. In 2005 with the help of an NSF Graduate Fellowship he started his PhD in University of California at San Diego graduating in 2008. During the course of his PhD, Fyodor became interested in field work in the Arctic working with endangered endemic bird species, which continues to be an important aspect of his research.
After starting his lab in 2008 at the Centre for Genomic Regulation, Fyodor began to combine theoretical, computational and experimental biology. Over the years, Fyodor’s work morphed into an interdisciplinary concoction of interwoven research directions. Combining theory, computation, field work, experimental and synthetic biology approaches, the work of the Evolutionary and Synthetic Biology Unit strives, in equal measure, to understand the evolution of living forms and to use that understanding to design novel biological systems.