Edward Shuryak was born in 1948 and grew up in Odessa, Ukraine. Winning the second place in Siberian Mathematics Olympiad, he was admitted into a special high school in 1964 and then into Novosibirsk State University, where he graduated in 1970 in Physics. Under the supervision of S.T. Belyaev, Shuryak received his Ph.D. in 1974 from the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics, where he continued on as a researcher while simultaneously teaching at Novosibirsk State University. He became a full professor in 1982, the year in which he also gave the first series of lectures at CERN about quark-gluon plasma, a new form of matter for which he proposed the name in a 1978 paper. He moved to the United States in 1990 and became Professor of Physics at Stony Brook University, leading the Nuclear Theory Center. In 2004, Shuryak was promoted to Distinguished Professor, the highest academic appointment rank in the State University of New York system.

Shuryak is theauthor or co-author of nearly 400 papers which in total have been cited more than 32,000 times; four of these papers have been cited more than 1,000 each, and another nine have been cited more than 500 times each. His H-index is about 87, according to Google Scholar.

Gives a complete coverage of topological objects in nonperturbative QCD and their interrelation in gauge theories

Covers electroweak sphalerons and their role in baryon asymmetry of the universe and the physics of supersymmetric gauge theories

Presents a unique set of lectures, containing advance theoretical material in form accessible to graduate students

Provides useful discussions about the concept of duality in modern field theories

Authored by a lead expert in the field