Miron Naumovich Sher (; June 29, 1952 – August 20, 2020) was a Soviet-born American chess player, who was awarded the title of Grandmaster (GM) by FIDE in 1992. Towards the end of the Soviet era, he began winning the open sections at international tournaments. In 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved, Sher became a Russian citizen. In 1997, Sher, his wife, Woman Grandmaster (WGM) Alla Grinfeld (ru), and their son, Mikhail, who then was 14, emigrated to America and settled in Brooklyn. Sher went on to become a distinguished scholastic chess coach and clinician in New York and was instrumental in developing several internationally strong players, notably Fabiano Caruana, many times number two in the world, and Robert Hess, who at age , while attending Stuyvesant High School, became an international master and at , a grandmaster. Before immigrating, Sher had coached Peter Heine Nielsen. Career Sher was born in Chernivtsi, Ukraine, and completed his bachelor's degree at Chernivtsi University. He went on to grad school at the State Central Order of Lenin Institute of Physical Education in Moscow; and, in 1975, in addition to his academics, Sher met the norms and was awarded the national title and rank Master of Sports of the USSR in Chess (ru) – one of twenty-five nationwide to earn the distinction that year (not to be confused with an academic master's degree in Sports). Sher's wife, WGM Alla Grinfeld (see Family section below) won the title, Master of Sports of the USSR in Chess, a year earlier. She was one of three women, nationwide, to win the distinction in 1974. Over the prior nineteen years – from 1950, when the distinction was first conferred upon women, through 1973 – only 56 women had won the title. Sher's tournament successes include a shared 1 place at the 1981 USSR Armed Forces Championship (ru) for chess in Mykolaiv and a shared 3 place at the semifinals of the Soviet Championship that same year. In that tournament, Arkady Novopashin (1932–2014) (ru) was 2 and WGM Maia Chiburdanidze, age at the time, tied GM Vladimir Tukmakov for 1. GM Adrian Mikhalchishin, also from the Ukraine who had known Sher since childhood, stated that Sher had been a student of Anatoly Gurevich and that he never got to play on the Ukrainian youth team despite his talent because he was competing for spots with future GMs Alexander Beliavsky,