Nikolai Ivanovich Shakura (Николай Иванович Шакура) was born in Belarus SSR on October 7, 1945. He is the hea of the relativistic astrophysics department at the Sternberg Astronomical Institute, Moscow University. A well-known specialist in theory of accretion and in astrophysics of x-ray binaries, together with Rashid Sunyaev he is particularly famous as the developer of the standard theory of disk accretion.