Dr. Georgiev is chief of laboratory at the Institute of Gene Biology, Russian Academy of Sciences, in Moscow, where he received his D.Sc. in 1996. He received his Ph.D. from the V.A. Engelhardt Institute of Molecular Biology. He pursued postdoctoral training with a Fogarty International fellowship in the Department of Biology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. He became an HHMI international research scholar in 1995. In 1999 he was awarded the title of professor and was elected to the Academia Europaea. He is also the recipient of the Russian National Prize for his work on genome organization and regulation of transcription in the eukaryote. In 2000 he was elected to the Russian Academy of Sciences, and, in 2003, he received the Russian Federation's Government prize in biology. This is his third HHMI award.

Pavel Georgiev investigates the mechanisms and control of telomere elongation and enhancer-promoter interactions in Drosophila. The main aims are to study the role of telomere-associated proteins in the regulation of telomere length, to understand the role of insulators in gene regulation, and to identify proteins that facilitate communication between an enhancer and a promoter.