An associate professor at the Department of History of Ukraine at V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, where he is working on the monograph "Socialist Cities in the Ukrainian SSR: Idea, Realization, Heritage." Roman's research offers a look at the history and modernity of the socialist cities of Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, and Kryvyi Rih in three dimensions: symbolic, spatial, and vernacular. 

Roman studied history at V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University. He defended his Ph.D. thesis on the history of the everyday life of workers in Kharkiv in the 1920s and 1930s. He has participated in summer schools, workshops, and seminars on urban studies, memory politics, and the study and teaching of Holocaust history. In 2019-2021, he was a participant (head and coordinator of the research team) in the International Research Project "Self-Representation Practices of Multinational Cities in the Industrial and Post-Industrial Era," supported by the Kowalski Program and the Contemporary Ukraine Studies Program of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta. The project resulted in a collective monograph in which Roman published part of his research and edited a chapter.

During his research residence supported by the Körber-Stiftung Foundation, he focused on the everyday practices of socialist cities' residents, architectural projects, the evolution of socialist cities' images during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and changes in the toponymic and symbolic landscape after decommunization.