Dr. Appelbaum held faculty positions in nuclear engineering with the University of Florida and the University of California before beginning commercial work in chemotherapeutics for cancer treatment. He has also worked on medical applications for particle accelerators and lasers (proton and neutron cancer therapy), electron and ion beam modification of materials, and sterilization and freeze-drying of medical and food products. He is currently an advisor to the International Science and Technology Center in Moscow and to the U.S. State Department's "Bio-Initiative" program. He has also served as a consultant to the U.S. Department of Defense, NASA and the JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), California Institute of Technology, MIT, and the Universities of California, Florida, Florida State, Maryland and North Carolina.

Dr. Appelbaum is co-founder and president of Avirid Biotechnology, LLC, a company developing technology for the design and synthesis of antiviral compounds. He received his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics, Russian Academy of Sciences in 1978. In 1987 he emigrated to the U.S., where he became an American citizen in 1993. He is the author of over 70 scientific papers, and is a member of the American Association for Advancement in Science, the American Physical Society, the American Nuclear Society, the American Association for Cancer Research and the New York Academy of Sciences.