Professor Yuriy Shkuratov is Professor and Department Head for the Astronomy Department at Kharkov National University. He was also the Director of the Astronomical Institute of V.N. Karazin Kharkov National University from 2004-2014. He is the Leading Research Scientist at the Institute of Radio Astronomy of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. He has more than 700 scientific publications devoted to the investigation of optical properties of solid surfaces of celestial bodies and arbitrary shaped particles. These works include chapters for seven collective monographs. He first obtained images of polarimetric anomalies of the Moon at large phase angles.

He has performed numerous laboratory photometric and polarimetric measurements of structure analogs of the lunar regolith, which provide a reliable experimental basis for the verification and selection of theoretical models for the opposition effect and negative polarization. Professor Shkuratov has contributed theoretical models of light scattering by particles and surfaces with complicated structure. In particular, he first proposed the model of negative polarization based on the mechanism of coherent backscatter enhancement.