Ilya's Doctorate focused on predicting financial market movements by analysing social media data. With no such data readily accessible at the time, Ilya raised funding to lead and develop what became Europe's first platform for at scale analytics of social media data. Partnering with Twitter, this platform processed millions of social media messages in real time to predict capital market movements and was later used to track geopolitical phenomena.

To learn how to build and run data and AI powered business solutions, Ilya completed a degree combining elements from London Business School's MBA program with development of new data technologies at the world renowned UK PhD Centre in Financial Computing. His thesis work focused on evolutionary structuring of crisis resilient investment portfolios and he later partnered with a leading macro investment fund to to implement these in practice

Motivated by solving human mobility challenges, Ilya completed a degree that brought together advanced civil engineering, finance, investment and economics topics. His thesis proved that investment portfolios focussed on transportation and mobility can weather economic crises, showing the enduring importance of mobility for global economic development

In his first foray into development of new business value grounded in technology, Ilya completed a degree that gave him a strong technical foundation for building economically viable machines and systems. He demonstrated a low cost nano scale fabrication technique and developed a high efficiency automotive drive train system for the Shell Eco-marathon