Nobel Prize Recipient. Zhores Alferov, a Russian physicist, received world-wide recognition upon being awarded the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics. He shared the coveted prize with German-American physicist, Herbert Kroemer and American electrical engineer, Jack Kilby. He and Kroemer received half of the coveted prize, and sharing the remaining half with Kilby. Alferov and Kroemer received the award, according to the Nobel Prize committee "for developing semiconductor heterostructures used in high-speed- and opto-electronics," whereas Kilby received his "for his part in the invention of the integrated circuit." Born in what is now Belarus, he lived through the horrors of World War II, including the death of his brother in battle. He graduated from V.I. Ulyanov (Lenin) Electrical Institute in 1952. He went to work at the Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences the next year and continued working there for the rest of his career. In the 1960s, he started working in the area of semiconductor heterostructures and his contributions to physics and technology of semiconductor heterostructures, especially investigations of injection properties, development of lasers, solar cells, LED's, and epitaxy processes have led to the creation of modern heterostructure physics and electronics. Using Kroemer's theory but working independently, he and his research team developed the first practical heterostructure electronic device in 1966. He received a doctorate in physics and mathematics from the A.F. Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute in 1970 and was its director from 1987 to 2003. Besides the Nobel Prize, he also earned various other honors and awards for his career work. In 1995, he was elected to the Russian State Duma and was re-elected in 1999, 2003, and 2007. He married in 1967 and had two children. He died after suffering a hypertensive emergency.