Alexander Goldfarb (Russian Microbiologist and Activist)

Alexander Davidovich Goldfarb
Alexander Goldfarb in 2007
Born	1947 (age 69–70) Moscow, Russia
Occupation	Microbiologist, Activist, Author
Known for	Co-founder of Litvinenko Justice Foundation

Alexander Davidovich Goldfarb (a.k.a. Alex Goldfarb, Russian: Александр Давидович Гольдфарб) (born 1947 in Moscow) is a Russian-American microbiologist, activist, and author. He emigrated from the USSR in 1975 and lived in Israel and Germany before settling permanently in New York in 1982. Goldfarb is a naturalized American citizen. He has combined a scientific career as a microbiologist with political and public activities focused on civil liberties and human rights in Russia, in the course of which he has been associated with Andrei Sakharov, George Soros, Boris Berezovsky, and Alexander Litvinenko. He has not visited Russia since 2000.

Goldfarb studied biochemistry at Moscow State University and graduated in 1969. After graduation, he worked at the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy in Moscow. He emigrated from the USSR in 1975. He received a Ph.D. in 1980 from the Weizmann Institute in Israel and continued his research with a post-doctoral program at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried near Munich, Germany. From 1982 to 1991 he was an assistant professor at Columbia University in New York. From 1992 to 2006 he was a faculty member at the Public Health Research Institute in New York where he led a U.S. government-funded study "Structure and Function of RNA Polymerase in E. coli" with a total budget of $7 million. He also directed the project "Treating MDRTB in Siberian Prisons" funded by a $13 million grant from philanthropist George Soros. According to a PubMed search, Goldfarb stopped publishing scientific work in 2005.