Mikhail Bleyzer This is Me

 Web References

1. 1. News

   www.sigmableyzer.com/en/compan - [Cached]

   Published on: 3/14/2006   Last Visited: 10/7/2006

   The young man born Mikhail Bleyzer had all the credentials for conventional success. He graduated from college in 1973 in Kharkov, Ukraine's second-biggest city, with a population of 2 million. His father was a thoracic surgeon esteemed throughout the U.S.S.R. Mikhail earned a master's degree in digital electronics and quantum physics at the Kharkov Institute of Radioelectronics.
   ...
   When Mikhail received his first postgraduation assignment -- supporting irrigation in the Turkmenistan desert -- he decided to try for a new life. In 1978, as U.S.-Soviet détente briefly flourished and the Kremlin adopted a policy that Bleyzer affectionately recalls as "Jews for grain," he succeeded. Not wanting to follow the mass of Russian emigrants to New York City's Brighton Beach neighborhood, he chose Houston, after getting a chance tip about the oil boom there. He arrived with his wife, three-year-old daughter and a suitcase and spent the first month indoors watching television news and talk shows as a crash course in conversational English.
   
   Bleyzer says of the U.S.S.R.: "I hated that place when I left.
   ...
   Bleyzer spent 13 years at Exxon, ending up in Brussels as information technology manager for petrochemical operations in Europe and Asia. He left in 1992 to join Ernst & Young's Brussels office as a consultant.