Roald Zinnurovich Sagdeev (, ; born 26 December 1932) is a Russian expert in plasma physics and a former director of the Space Research Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences. He was also a science advisor to the Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. Sagdeev graduated from Moscow State University. He is a member of both the Russian Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He has worked at the University of Maryland, College Park since 1989 in the University of Maryland College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences. He is also currently a Senior Advisor at the Albright Stonebridge Group, a global strategy firm, where he assists clients with issues involving Russia and countries in the former Soviet Union. Sagdeev was married to, and divorced from, Susan Eisenhower, granddaughter of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Sagdeev was the recipient of the 2003 Carl Sagan Memorial Award, and the James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics (2001). Early years Roald Sagdeev is an ethnic Tatar. His maternal grandfather was a secular man teaching mathematics. He was born in Moscow on December 26, 1932, soon after the arrival of his young parents from Tatarstan. The family used to speak Russian at home. Nonetheless, the parents also communicated in Tatar between adults when secrecy was needed. He lived with them until the age of four near the Nikitsky Gates. His father was then a post-graduate student. He spent the following years in Kazan where he graduated from a high school. The young Roald was not only a quite outstanding student who was awarded the Silver Medal, but also champion of chess among juniors of his city. His brother Renad Zinnurovich Sagdeev (born December 13, 1941) would later study chemistry. Roald returned to Moscow to study at the Moscow State University. He was one of a few of Lev Landau's students, the Soviet Nobel laureate. In the dormitory he lived next to Mikhail Gorbachev, a law student, and Raisa Gorbachyova, a sociology student. As a researcher In 1955, after graduating from Moscow State University in nuclear science, Doctorate in Physics and Mathematics, he worked at the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy as a member of the controlled fusion team, with Igor Kurchatov as director from 1956 to 1961. From 1961 until 1970, he worked as head of the Laboratory at the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Siberian Division of the USSR Academy of Sciences