Alexander Balankin (born March 3, 1958) is a Russian-Mexican scientist (Баланкин, Александр Сергеевич) whose work in the field of fractal mechanics and its engineering applications won him the UNESCO Science Prize in 2005.

[4] In 1998 Professor Balankin founded a National Interdisciplinary Research Group Fractal Mechanics as a joint venture between industry and university.

Further, he has discovered new important general features in dynamics of self-affine interfaces growing far from equilibrium: a new type of unconventional anomalous roughening dynamics of flame fronts in heterogeneous media, self-affine fluctuations of growing interface width, non-universal nature of interface roughness dynamics in systems with long-range spatial and temporal correlations, a new statistical distribution function for interface roughness statistics, relationships between structural, mechanical, and dynamical properties of an elastic fractal networks, fractal kinetics of self-organization of dissipative structures in the process of mechanical alloying in attritors, fractal morphology of sol-gels materials, fractal scattering of radar microwaves from soils.

From 2001, Professor Balankin has also been involved in an ambitious project of fractal study of soils, which is expected to introduce revolutionary changes in the agriculture technology that will provide great benefits to Mexico and to developing countries.

This finding permits us to use the powerful tools of kinetic roughening theory to classify, model, and forecast the fluctuations of real-world time series.

It is important to mention, the risk-informed in-service inspection program increases vessel safety, because it focuses on any potential additional examinations on those areas which are most likely to experience the probable failure conditions.

More recently, Professor Balankin has developed a new methodology of probabilistic reliability assignment of cable-stayed bridges, actually used by the Mexican Transport Institute.

The proposed risk-based pipeline assessment procedure is more reliable to account for huge amount of collected data usually obtained in in-service inspections using the intelligent devices.

Professor Balankin has been the recipient of many other awards and honours, including the highest honour awarded in Mexico, the National Prize for Arts and Sciences in the area Technology and Design in 2002[6] and the UNESCO Science Prize in 2005, for his remarkable ability to relate his research in fractal mechanics to technological applications that has provided great benefits to Mexico and worldwide.