It was Skopec and another colleague, Vasily Iskovskikh, who influenced considerably the development of Shokurov's mathematical interests at that time.

In it Shokurov brought to a completion the work on solving the Schottky-type problem for Prym varieties which originated in papers of Arnaud Beauville and Andrey Tyurin.

Shokurov proved a criterion which allows to decide whether the principally polarized Prym variety of a Beauville's pair, subject to some stability conditions, is the Jacobian of some smooth curve.

Shokurov is presently a full professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and a non-tenured faculty member of the Steklov Institute of Mathematics in Moscow.

[1][2] He is involved both in research and in teaching and he has supervised 9 Ph.D. students in different problems of birational geometry, including Fields medallist Caucher Birkar, Florin Ambro, Ivan Cheltsov, Jihun Park, Sung Rak Choi, Yifei Chen, Joseph Cutrone, and Nicholas Marshburn.