Asimov, Isaac

Isaac Asimov was born as Isaak Yudovich Ozimov in a small town near Smolensk in the former Soviet Union. When he was three years old he moved with his parents to New York where they came to own several candy stores/newsagents. Asimov studied at Columbia University, New York, and took his doctor's degree in chemistry in 1948. Between 1942 and 1945 he worked at the American Air Force experimental base in Philadelphia after which he was attached to the Boston University School of Medicine. He began to write full time in 1958, although he was appointed Professor of Biochemistry in 1979. In 1973, he married Janet (Opal) Jeppson (1926–2019), a marriage that lasted until his death. Under the name J.O. Jeppson she wrote books including a couple of humorous science-fiction stories as Laughing Space (1982), and as Janet Asimov the merry detective story Murder at the Galactic Writers Society (1995).