Sergey Danilovich Polyakov is an educator and a psychologist, professor, with a PhD and a postdoctoral degree in education. He was born on August 18, 1946 in the town of Stupino, Moscow province. A graduate of the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute named after Lenin (1969), Polyakov worked as a schoolteacher in Yakutia, in Ulyanovsk province, Ulyanovsk, and Moscow. He got his PhD at the General Problems of Social Education Research Institute of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences (Moscow, 1977). Polyakov belongs to the research school founded by the late Dr. Ludmilla Novikova, a member of the Russian Academy of Education. Since 1981, he has been teaching at Ulyanovsk State Pedagogical University (UlGPU), where Polyakov founded a research school and a graduate program in education. He is involved in research in psychology and social education, and in an educational innovation theory. In 1994, Polyakov defended his postdoctorate thesis entitled Foundations of social education innovation theory (Institute of Theoretical Pedagogy and International Research of the Russian Academy of Education, Moscow). He has over 200 research publications in such journals as Pedagogy, Public Education, New Educational Values, Issues of Social Education, Issues of Psychology, World of Psychology, School Principal, Homeroom Teacher, etc., as well as 15 monographs (including Social Education Technologies (Moscow, 2002), Psycho-pedagogy of Social Education and Teaching (Moscow, 2004), Realistic Social Education (Moscow, 2004), Pedagogical innovation theory: from an idea to practice (Moscow, 2007), Collective creative social education: reloading (Moscow, 2015) and others. Since 2001 Polyakov has been head of the UlGPU Dissertation Council in Education. 17 PhD dissertations have been successfully completed under his supervision.