Nikolay Ratakhin was born December 24, 1950 in the village Novotroitsk of the Irkutsk region.

In 1973, he graduated from the Physics Department of Novosibirsk State University.

He has been working at the Siberian Branch of the RAS since 1973, having gone from a trainee researcher to the director of the Institute of High Current Electronics of the SB RAS (since 2006).

He has been teaching at the Department of Plasma Physics, Tomsk State University, and since 2005 - at the Tomsk Polytechnic University.

Since 2006 - Head of the Department of High Current Electronics, TPU.
In 2015, the department was joined with the Department of Technology and Electrophysics of the High Voltage and renamed as the Department of High Voltage Electrophysics and High Current Electronics, where N.A. Ratakhin became the head.
After the unification of the departments - professor of the Department of Materials Science, TPU.

In 2006, he was elected a corresponding member of the RAS.
In 2016, he was elected an academician of the RAS.

He is also the chairman of the Board of Directors of the TSC SB RAS;
Member of the Presidium of the SB RAS;
Deputy Chairman of the Joint Scientific Council for Physical Sciences of the SB RAS.

Awards
Order of the Red Banner of Labor (1990)
Joint Institute of Nuclear Research First Prize (2001) for the work “Investigation of reactions between light nuclei in the field of ultra-low energies using liner plasma”