Yuri Yarim-Agaev is the President of Transcom International and Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He has been Senior Research Fellow at Stanford University, Research Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Visiting Scientist in the Department of Chemistry at New York University, and Visiting Professor of Business at Monmouth University.
Dr. Yarim-Agaev is a scientist, economist and human rights activist who was a key member of the Moscow Helsinki Group and a leader of the human rights movement in Russia, working closely with Andrei Sakharov and other dissidents. After receiving his Ph.D. in physics and applied mathematics from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, he worked as Senior Scientist for the Institute of Chemical Physics in the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences. As a consequence of his dissident activities, he was forced into exile.
Dr. Yarim-Agaev founded the Center for Democracy in the U.S.S.R. in 1984 to support dissidents in the U.S.S.R. By the late 1980s, he co-founded Democracy and Independence (with Vladimir Bukovsky and Paruir Hairikyan), an organization devoted to promoting the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union into new independent states. The organization held international conferences in Paris (1989) and Prague (1990), involving dissidents from the various Soviet republics. In 1991, by invitation of the new Yeltsin-led Russian government, Dr. Yarim-Agaev developed a comprehensive program to secure the free flow of information in Russia.
Dr. Yarim-Agaev has also served as Head of Quantitative Analytics at J. P. Morgan, Executive Vice President for Science and Technology at Montason Technology, Vice President at Deutsch Bank and Bankers Trust Company, and Project Manager for both Bell Communications Research and General Electric Company.
