Pesin is currently a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Mathematics and the Director of the Anatole Katok Center for Dynamical Systems and Geometry at the Pennsylvania State University (PSU).

Following his graduation of the school (with honors) in 1965, he successfully passed entry exams to the Department of Mechanics and Mathematics (or "Mech-Mat") of Moscow State University.

Thus, he was not permitted to continue his study at the university graduate school and was subsequently assigned to work at a research institute in Moscow (for a more complete historical account of the anti-Semitic sentiment in the Soviet mathematics establishment during this period see the article).

[1] Since Pesin always dreamed to be a "pure" mathematician, under the circumstances, he chose to combine his work at the institute with his after-hours research in mathematics and within a few years after graduation, he made a number of outstanding breakthroughs in the theory of smooth dynamical systems.

5) Pesin's work in Mathematical Physics includes the study of Coupled Map Lattices associated with infinite chains of hyperbolic systems as well as the ones generated by some diffusion-type PDEs such as FitzHu-Nagumo and Belousov-Zhabotinsky equations.

Yakov Pesin holds a tenured faculty position at the Pennsylvania State University, where he has advised numerous PhD students on their thesis.

In addition to his regular teaching responsibilities, he designed and taught courses at the special MASS (Mathematics Advanced Study Semester) program on Dynamical Systems[7] and Analytic and Projective Geometry.