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Summary
Beyond being the founder of Sci-Hub, the world's largest pirate site for academic papers, and risking arrest as a result, Alexandra Elbakyan is a typical science graduate student: idealistic, hard-working, and relatively poor. After becoming hooked on science at an early age, she discovered a knack for computer hacking when she went to university in Kazakhstan, where she was born. After a stint in Germany working on brain-computer interfaces, she returned home, where frustrations with journal paywalls led her to create Sci-Hub. She is now enrolled in a history of science master's program.
