Future Professor Khurgin came into this world on a cold April 4 morning of 1957 in a city that back then was called Leningrad and has since reverted to its old name St. Petersburg (not Florida). From there on he progressed, unnoticed, through the normal stages of childhood and adolescence typical for a former Soviet Union youth. He joined all the necessary Party youth organizations, but did not rise through the ranks. He successfully graduated from a high school, where being a typical nerd and the only child of a Jewish mother he succeeded in math and was dismal in athletics. Later on though, he played competitive ice hockey and lost a tooth doing it, which he has been proud ever since. In 1973 for no particular reason except strong desire to avoid being drafted into the Soviet Army, he enrolled into the higher learning establishment proudly called the "Institute of Precision Mechanics and Optics", where he learned a number of card games, developed affinity and aptitude for drinking and strong antipathy towards smoking (of everything) and while pursuing the activities outlined above, he acquired a number of friends with whom he has been stuck ever since. Every summer the future professor was employed in construction in various regions of the former Soviet Union, usually the regions that are not shown on postcards. In 1979 Prof. Khurgin actually graduated from the Institute, first in his class with a Master Thesis dedicated to the powerful molecular laser amplifier. Of that Professor Khurgin has never been proud.

At about that time the relationship between the future Professor and his Country reached its nadir, and he decided to use the short opening provided by Detente to leave the Soviet Union. His timing could not have been more perfect, and in a short period between Invasion of Afghanistan and the 1980 Moscow Olympics, Prof. Khurgin found himself first in Italy, and then in the United States, where to his own surprise he was promptly hired by Philips Laboratories in Briarcliff Manor, NY. During his seven-and-a-half year stay at Philips Khurgin worked on miniature solid state lasers, electron-beam-pumped visible semiconductor lasers,frequency conversion in nonlinear optical waveguides, and his tennis stroke. Among his more practical pursuits at Philips was design of high-brightness projection TV-sets, 3-D television, and X-ray imaging technology. All of it has resulted in a number of patents that made Philips even richer and Khurgin even more cynical. 

While his daylight hours were spent in the dark labs and brightly lit corridors of Philips Laboratories and on the tennis court next to it, the night life of future professor consisted of driving under the moonlight through the congested streets of New York City and sleeping together with a lot of people in the night classes, first at Columbia University and then at the Brooklyn Poly, a.k.a. Polytechnic University of New York. This activity had resulted in Ph. D. degree in Electrical Engineering awarded in 1987. The doctoral dissertation was based mostly on Dr. Khurgin's fooling around Philips Labs on the weekends and was called: "Dynamics and Coherent Phenomena in Electron-Beam-Pumped Semiconductor Lasers".

In the Summer of 1986 an earth-shattering event occured in Dr. Khurgin's life. Naturally, it took place in San Francisco, where he had met Professor Alexander E. Kaplan at one of the conferences. A chain of unforeseen events triggered by that fateful encounter had culminated in Dr. Khurgin leaving his cozy office with a fantastic view of Hudson Valley and finding himself, in the midst of wet Baltimore winter of 1987/88 at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the Johns Hopkins University. From there on, Professor Khurgin's life had lacked dramatic changes and consisted of writing a number of papers, preparing endless proposals, teaching one course after another, releasing one graduate student after another and, finally arriving at tenure and position of Full Professor in 1995.