  The Virtual Observatory has reached sufficient maturity for its routine
scientific exploitation by astronomers. To prove this statement, here I present
a brief description of the complete VO-powered PhD thesis entitled "Galactic
and extragalactic research with modern surveys and the Virtual Observatory"
comprising 4 science cases covering various aspects of astrophysical research.
These comprize: (1) homogeneous search and measurement of main physical
parameters of Galactic open star clusters in huge multi-band photometric
surveys; (2) study of optical-to-NIR galaxy colors using a large homogeneous
dataset including spectroscopy and photometry from SDSS and UKIDSS; (3) study
of faint low-mass X-ray binary population in modern observational archives; (4)
search for optical counterparts of unidentified X-ray objects with large
positional uncertainties in the Galactic Plane. All these projects make heavy
use of the VO technologies and tools and would not be achievable without them.
So refereed papers published in the frame of this thesis can undoubtedly be
added to the growing list of VO-based research works.
