Dmitry Turaev was born in 1963 and grew up in the city of Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod) in Russia. He studied mathematics at Gorky University from 1980 to 1985, after which he worked as a researcher at the Institute for Applied Mathematics and Cybernetics in Nizhny Novgorod, until his immigration to Israel in 1996. He received his PhD in 1991, supervised by Leonid Shilnikov, a pioneering figure in chaos theory, with whom Dmitry maintained very successful collaboration long after. He held postdocs at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Georgia Tech and, later, the Weierstrass Institute for Applied Analysis and Stochastics in Berlin. He returned to Israel in 2003 as an associate professor in mathematics at the Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheva and joined the Department of Mathematics at Imperial College London in 2007.
Turaev has collaborated with many scientists from various parts of the world, maintaining the decades-long partnership with Shilnikov scientific school in Nizhny Novgorod and with colleagues and friends in Israel, Germany, US, UK, Portugal, Brazil, Spain, Poland, France, Japan, Turkey. He contributed to a wide range of topics in dynamical systems and dynamical problems related to physics, including homoclinic orbits, bifurcation theory, strange attractors, Hamiltonian systems, dynamics of PDEs, Fermi acceleration, dark matter physics, optics, and quantum mechanics. The main theme of his research, bifurcations of chaotic dynamics, is exemplified by his invited talk on Richness of Chaos in the Absolute Newhouse domain at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Hyderabad (2010).