His father was born in Bessarabia. Ilya is the brother of Misha Kapovich and Vitali Kapovich. He's Katia Kapovich's cousin. He is known for his contributions to geometric group theory, geometric topology, and complexity theory. He received his Ph.D. from the Graduate Center of CUNY in 1996 under the direction of Gilbert Baumslag. After postdoc positions at Rutgers University and Hebrew University, he worked at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign from 2000 to 2018. While at Illinois, he has had several visiting positions. Most notably, he was an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation research fel- low at Frankfurt University during Spring 2006, and Ada Peluso Visiting Professor at Hunter College during Spring 2017. In 2012, he was named an inaugural fellow of the American Mathematical Society. He delivered an invited address at 2008 Spring Eastern Sectional meeting of the AMS. He has worked on problems related to automorphisms of free groups, free- by-cyclic groups, mapping class groups as well as complexity and decision problems in group theory. He hassupervised 8 PhD students to completion as of 2020. Between 2010 and 2015, he served on the editorial board of the LMS Journal ofMathematics and Computation. He is member of the Steering Committee of the AAAS Science and Human Rights Coalition.