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Upon the education of the people of this country the fate of this country depends. - Benjamin Disraeli 1804-1881

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Natasha manages the Office of Grants and Special Information in the Institute of Biochemistry and Physiology of Microorganisms in the Russian Academy of Science in Pushchino, Moscow region. This office was established only recently -- at the end of 1993 -- and is a unit of the Computing Center in the Institute. The main role of the office is providing Internet-based information delivery services to assist the Russian scientific community in obtaining needed information. The Office of Grants and Special Information, together with the Computing Center, makes use of Unix-based information systems (Gopher, WAIS, WWW).

Before this job, Natasha worked 2 years in the Special Designed Bureau for Biological Devices in Pushchino, where she designed programs for microbiological devices with microprocessor control.

In 1990, she began work in the the Computing Center of the Institute of Biochemistry and Physiology of Microorganism in Pushchino. Her main responsibility is the design, creation, and support of databases for the All-Russian Collection of Microorganisms (VKM), using IRIS software on an IBM PC computers running the DOS operating system. She now uses Gopher and WAIS on the BSDI unix operating system to publish these databases on the network.

At present, the VKM collection is one of the largest, constantly expanded collections in Russia. It includes over 9000 strains of bacteria, actinomycetes, filamentous and yeast fungi, and genetically-modified strains.

Natasha finished her University education in 1986 at the Electrotechnical Institute in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg).

Natasha has been married for 13 years and has an eleven-year old son, Ivan. She enjoys hiking, swimming, art exhibitions and loves to read -- with particular interest in the Russian Chekov and the American Ernest Hemingway.