Yakov M. Shnir is the Leading Researcher at the Bogoliubov Laboratory of Theoretical Physics, Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna and he holds a part time position of Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Belarusian State University in Minsk. His research focuses on topological and non-topological solitons in classical field theory in flat and curved space-time. He has been involved in many of the recent developments in this area, in particular in investigating chaotic structures in dynamics of solitons, construction of knotted solutions in the Bose-Einstein condensate and analysis of thermodynamic properties of hairy black holes.