Volovik completed his master's degree at the Physico-Technical Institute in Moscow. In 1973 he went to the Landau Institute in Moscow, becoming Senior scientist in 1992. He completed his PhD in 1973 with a thesis called the "Dynamics of a particle strongly interacting with a Bose System. In "1981, his habilitation (Russian doctor degree) was on "the Topology of defects in condensed matter". In 1993, he was made Professor at the laboratory for low temperature physics of the Technical University of Helsinki (today's Aalto University), but still worked at the Landau Institute.