Oleg Balanovsky (1977 - 2021)

 I was really discouraged and very upset when yesterday I got to know that Professor of the Vavilov Institute of General Genetics (Russian Academy of Science) and Head of the Genome Geography Lab has drowned while saving children. 

"While swimming in the river, he saved the children, but he did not have the strength to swim out himself," wrote his colleagues on FB...

Prof. Balanovsky researched, inter alia, on geography of surnames. The method of the use of surnames as analogs of genetic markers is well known. It has been further developed and widely used by Russian researcher Oleg Balanovsky. He used surnames as quasi-genetic markers (the term coined by A. Revazov). Direct comparisonof the results obtained with the use of two types of markers, genetic and quasi-genetic, demonstrated that the use of surnames for studying the gene-pool structure can yield reliable results.

Below, you may enjoy some maps he created: