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Valentin Parmon: I was interested in many scientific disciplines during my life. First, I was very interested in biology, I was a young naturalist. But my school years and youth were in 1950-1960’s - the time when people made scientific discoveries, launched a rocket into space, built large power plants and raised the country. It has spurred my interest in technology. I spent a few days a week in Minsk Palace of pioneers in the classes of modeling. I was lucky with the teachers of the exact sciences, so I seriously prepared for entering the Moscow Institute of physics and technology. At the end I obtained the engineer-physicist diploma with the specialty on "chemistry of fast processes". Then there was the postgraduate school of MIPT, protection of the thesis for the candidate degree at the Institute of chemical physics in 1977 and, finally, the invitation to the Novosibirsk Institute of catalysis, from my academic supervisor Kirill Zamaraev. He was fascinated by the idea of creating artificial analogues of photosynthesis. And whereas I was engaged exclusively in fundamental issues in Moscow, I was given a more practical task in Novosibirsk, which, however, could not be solved without academic training. Some of them were aimed at the use of catalytic methods of transformation of solar energy into chemical energy. Thus I became involved in the catalysis.
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