Kirill lives in Moscow, where he was born in 1965. Both of his parents were engineers who worked in the Russian defense industry. As a child, Kirill was first exposed to English by his grandfather, who had taught himself English and had many foreign pen pals. Kirill remembers learning the word, “watermelon,” which, he said to my delight, “gluts your mouth perfectly.” Kirill later studied English at his school which, in addition to the foreign-language curriculum, sometimes welcomed tourists from the UK or the USA.

Kirill was a good student, especially in biology, but less interested in mathematics (which is ironic, given his work as a statistician). In particular, Kirill was not at ease with algebra, "too weak in propositional thinking," he complains. He considers his imagination to be "geometric," such that he would "rather think of a correlation coefficient as a cosine rather than a product of moments."

His interest in biology continues in his passion for collecting beetles and butterflies, which he has been doing since he was about seven years old. High on his list of potential adventures, if the opportunity were to present itself, would be to go beetle hunting in the tropics or visit the “dry, laconic landscape” of the deserts of Arizona or Nevada, which, he says, “are not far away from my own nature.”

Not a complete bookworm in school, Kirill enjoyed participating in after-school athletics, especially archery. He says, “Archery is very graceful and the bow is among the most elegant [of shapes]”