After studying Physics and Naval engineering, Kurchatov was a research assistant at the faculty of Physics of the Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute in Baku. Later he researched under Ioffe at the Physico-Technical Institute on various problems connected with radioactivity. After working in a variety of research laboratories and the Azerbaijan Polytechnic Institute in Baku for a year, he came to the Leningrad Institute for Physics and Technology (the Russian abbreviation of this institution is LFTI) in 1925. Kurchatov's talent for experimenting and organization was recognized there. His early work was consumed with physics of crystals like dielectric and ferroelectric materials. One of his important results was the discovery of ferroelectric properties of Seignette salt. This discovery earned a degree of doctor of physics and mathematics for him. He was awarded this degree without a dissertation in 1934. In 1932, he received funding for his own nuclear science research team, which built the Soviet Union's first cyclotron particle accelerator in 1939.