Serhii Plokhii is the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History and the director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University, where he leads a grup of scholars working on MAPA: Digital Atlas of Ukraine. A leading authority on Eastern Europe and Russia, he has published extensively on the international history of Cold War. His books won numerous awards, including the Lionel Gelber Prize for the best English-language book on the international relations for The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union (2014), Taras Shevchenko National Prize (Ukraine) for The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (2015), and Ballie Gifford Prize and Pushkin House Book Prize, UK for Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy, (2018). His latest book, Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis was released in April 2021.