Maxim Viktorovich Chistotin

Maxim Viktorovich Chistotin (Максим Викторович Чистотин) was born in Moscow in 1972 and educated as an agronomist, taking a Ph.D. in Biology in 2001 from the Russian Research Institute of Fertilisers and Soil Science. From 2001 to 2006, he worked at the Institute of Microbiology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and he has subsequently been working at the Russian Research Institute of Agrochemistry. Throughout his life, Chistotin has assiduously cultivated an interest in linguistics. In addition to a fluent command of Russian, Ukranian, English and German, he has gained a working command of Chinese, Sinhalese, Polish, Bulgarian and Dutch. He chose Sulung as the language on which to write a comprehensive grammar as his doctoral dissertation for the Himalayan Languages Project, and this strategic choice reveals the panoramic view which Chistotin has acquired of the field of Tibeto-Burman linguistics.