A Look Into the Life of Dr. Lev Sviridov

The American Dream: Immigrate. Struggle. Prosper. Dr. Lev Sviridov has done just that. Well, at least in some aspects. 

Sviridov has been the director of the Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College in New York City for the past nine years but most students know him as the man who is always running all over campus with his signature bow tie. However, many of those students are unaware of the events that led him to his current position.

As Sviridov puts it, he “had a very strange and mixed childhood.” Raised in Moscow, Russia, until he was 10 years old, Sviridov was “an only child of an only child.” His grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, faced immense challenges as a Russian Jew in the systemically antisemitic Soviet Union, and those struggles passed onto Sviridov.

His mother, Alexandra Sviridova, was a screenwriter who would occasionally bring Sviridov to work with her. It was because of his mother’s job that he discovered at an early age that “self-censorship were very important survival skills” because “if you say the wrong things in the wrong crowd, you are risking your parent being arrested.” 

His mother had ambitious dreams in the film industry. She worked on an investigative TV program that researched government corruption, the crimes of Stalin and other facets of the Soviet Union. It was his mother’s ambitious, investigative film dreams that paved the way for them to move to Canada and then the United States. 

As many immigrants can attest, this move did not come without hardships. Sviridov and his mother were homeless for a “good year and a half in the city,” a time in which he learned the value of a dollar. Sifting through the trash was not an uncommon endeavor. Sviridov remains impacted by his past as “the amount of dignity and self-respect that you have to put down to the side to dig through the trash never quite leaves you.”

Yet Sviridov learned to utilize these experiences. That destitution created a sense of drive and ambition for Sviridov to work towards his goals if only so that he and his mother would never have to be in that position again. Sviridov “did what any good immigrant would do, which is do well in school,” Specifically, he found science and math and let that be his driving force. 

For a lot of immigrants, these two subjects were a safe haven because of the language barrier in all other areas. “Russian schools and European schools [taught] more advanced mathematics than American schools,” he says, which meant Sviridov was finally ahead.

Sviridov went on to be the student body president of City College. In doing so he had the opportunity to speak on behalf of his constituents at a town hall meeting in 2004, where he introduced presidential candidate John Kerry and Senator Hillary Clinton. At the time, Sviridov had just become a citizen. Making the 2004 election momentous for him because it was the first election he ever voted in as an American. 

Sviridov later graduated with a B.S. degree in chemistry with a cumulative GPA of 3.92 and a perfect 4.0 in his major. Not all of it came so easily to him. Like many other students, he had to take organic chemistry more than once. Yet this has only allowed him to empathize with the very students he currently presides over. 

After college, Sviridov was awarded the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship from Oxford University and earned a D.Phil. degree in inorganic chemistry. Afterward, he came back to the United States for a postdoctoral job at the Energy Institute at City College. It was then that he was asked to serve on a panel for the Sloan Foundation. This took him to Hunter High School where he met the Hunter College president, Jennifer Rabb. “She was like, I know you from somewhere.” 

He later gave a talk at Hunter’s Brookdale campus about fellowships and as he was leaving, he shared a walk with one of President Rabb’s advisors, Judith Friedlander. She told him she was going to run the fellowship’s office but Sviridov said “you have no idea how any of that works. You need somebody else to do that.” 

In March of that same year, President Rabb called him at his lab and asked him to be the director of Macaulay. He has been the director ever since. While he is confident in his skills and abilities, he does believe luck played a role in his accomplishments. He says, “they say 80% of life is showing up. It’s more like 90.”

Though Sviridov’s formal title is the director of Macaulay, he says it should really be “director and beggar-in-chief.” His job involves going to every department at Hunter including the Bursar’s office, the financial aid office, Student Affairs, and more to beg them to complete tasks for Macaulay students. He says he respects his colleagues but the biggest problem is “we are all understaffed and the only way to draw their attention is to make a list, go to them in person and be like ‘while I have you for the next five minutes, can you type all of this?’”  

One of Sviridov’s primary goals as the director has been to create a sense of community within the Macaulay Honors College. He has worked to foster a supportive and inclusive environment where students feel welcome and valued, regardless of their background or circumstances. He attributes his success in connecting with his students to his background. He says, “I do not have to try to understand you. I lived your life to a certain degree.” Just like Sviridov, Macaulay students are high-achieving people, most of whom are unable to afford the typical costs of a quality education. 

What might shock Sviridov’s students to know is how much effort he puts into knowing his students. On his desk sits a booklet of every Macaulay Hunter student of the class of 2026 with a picture of them and a little biography on the side. He studies it every day. He has had packets like this for every class prior. 

He believes, “you cannot build community if you do not know who the kids are, and I would be a hypocrite to say this is important to me if I did not put in the effort.”  He says one of the worst things about COVID is that he feels like he does not know the sophomores or juniors. When he sees alumni, he knows exactly who they are, but he is unable to say the same for all his current students. For him, “it hurts a lot because these things are important. This is important. It is important to be true to what you want.” 

Sviridov does not define success by his fancy titles. Instead, success is measured by actions, he says. He was shocked when, at a recent alumni event, most of the men came in looking like little carbon copies of himself. Most of them were bearded and wearing bow ties. To him, “that is a measure of success.” Having his students want to follow in his footsteps is what makes his job worthwhile. To his students, he says, “I have been in your shoes. Now, my job is to make sure that my shoes fit you.”