Alex Schekochihin studied at the Moscow “Phystech” and at Princeton (PhD 2001). After postdoctoral stints at UCLA, Imperial College and Cambridge, he returned to Imperial as a faculty member in 2006. In 2008, he moved to Oxford, where he is now Professor of Theoretical Physics and Fellow of Merton College. Initially starting at Princeton with an interest in fusion plasmas, he focused on turbulent dynamo for his PhD, a topic he has never managed to let go completely, although he did later branch out to work on plasmoid reconnection, MHD turbulence, stochastic advection, astrophysical gyrokinetics, instabilities and turbulence in the solar wind, in tokamak plasmas and in galaxy clusters. Initially determined to be an ivory-tower theoretician, he now fraternises with observers and experimentalists, both real and numerical (but they still think he is an ivory-tower theoretician; it is unclear what ivory-tower theoreticians think or whether they exist). His current preoccupations fall within the broad theme of turbulence in weakly collisional plasmas (phase-space cascades, heating, pressure-anisotropic dynamics, dynamo) and focus particularly on turbulent transport in tokamaks, the solar wind and the (thermo)dynamics of galaxy clusters.