Here, I am bringing to you yet another story of a Nobel laurate, Konstantin Novoselov. He was awarded with the Nobel in Physics in the year 2010 for his ground-breaking experiments on the two-dimensional material graphene.

Konstantin Novoselov was born in the year 1974 in a middle-sized industrial city Nizhny Tagil which is about 20 kms from Russian capital Moscow. His father, Sergey Novoselov was an engineer, while mother was a teacher in the local school. He completed his school education from the local high school and obtained an MSc degree in Physics from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1997. After that he joined the laboratory of Prof. Andre Geim for PhD in the Radboud University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands and completed his PhD in the year 2004. During this period, he also got married to one of his colleagues in the lab, Irina Barbolina, a PhD in microbiology. The couple now has two daughters.

He worked in different institutes across different countries in Europe and finally took a professor position in National University of Singapore. Meanwhile, he also took British citizenship. This young scientist has many high impact publications into his credit and as on today, the total citation (an indicator used to represent scientific worth) of Novoselov is more than 180,000. He is one of the most cited authors in any field in the world.  

The following story of the gentleman is during the time when he was a professor in National University of Singapore. The Nobel committee has the convention of personally calling all the winners for declaration of the prize. So, in 2010 Konstantin Novoselov got a call from the president of the committee disclosing that he was awarded with the Nobel prize in Physics that year. But the call landed in an ‘odd time’ as he was busy working in the lab. Instead of being excited, he felt being bothered by the call and was not very happy to be forced to stop the experiment. I quote the reply of Novoselvo, “You’re basically saying I should stop my experiments now?”