Mikhail Kovalchuk: biography and scientific activity

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:55

Russian physicist Mikhail Kovalchuk was born in Leningrad on September 21, 1946 in a family of historians. At various times (and often at the same time) he was the director of several leading research institutes, including the Institute of Crystallography and the famous Kurchatov Institute, a member of the board at the Skolkovo Foundation, the host of popular science programs on television and the scientific secretary of the Council for education, technology and science under the President of the Russian Federation. In addition, he was engaged in many more cases, which will be discussed here, since the hero of this article is Mikhail Valentinovich Kovalchuk.

Family

The father of a prominent physicist, Valentin Mikhailovich, a historian, researcher at the Leningrad Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences, worked at the Institute of History and was a specialist in the blockade of Leningrad as he survived all its hardships. livedninety-seven years old, died in 2013. Mother taught history at Leningrad State University.

Mikhail Kovalchuk is the older brother of billionaire Yuri Kovalchuk, chairman of the board of directors at Rossiya Bank, who is associated with many large business assets. Yuri Kovalchuk is well known as a close friend of the President of the Russian Federation, and the son of a billionaire, Boris, headed the Department of Priority Projects in the Russian government, and currently chairs the board of JSC Inter RAO UES.

Wife and son

The wife of a popular physicist also deals with history, she is a specialist in Ireland and is the daughter of the no less famous historian Yu. Polyakov, academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The son of Mikhail Kovalchuk became the chairman of the board of directors of a large media holding - the National Media Group, which owns shares in Channel One and Five, STS Media, REN-TV, Izvestia and many other media.

The name of Kirill Kovalchuk flashed in the press about the scandal with the reconstruction of the Bolkonsky house in the center of the capital. It is very possible that Mikhail Andreevich Kovalchuk served in Spassk-Dalniy, but his relationship with the hero of this article could not be found.

Study

After graduating from the Faculty of Physics of Leningrad State University in 1970 and brilliantly defending his diploma at the Institute of Semiconductors of the USSR Academy of Sciences, the subject of which was the study of X-rays dynamically scattered in perfect crystals, Mikhail Kovalchuk did not remain in the proposed graduate school, but was distributed to Moscow as an intern - researcherShubnikov Institute of Crystallography, USSR Academy of Sciences.

Three years later he was hired. In 1978, Mikhail Kovalchuk, whose biography is extremely rich in scientific events, became a candidate of sciences, defending a dissertation in the same field and on a topic similar to the diploma.

PhD

Nine years later, Mikhail Kovalchuk was already the head of the laboratory of X-ray optics and synchrotron radiation. And ten years later - again defense, now the dissertation is prepared for the next degree - Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences.

During the defense, there were sharp opponents, according to whom the results presented by the dissertation are not benign enough: they are either erroneous or plagiarism. Nevertheless, they managed to fight back, and Mikhail Kovalchuk successfully defended himself.

Principal and Professor

In 1998, Mikhail Kovalchuk became a professor and head of the Institute of Crystallography, where he came not so long ago as a simple trainee. In 2000, the Department of General Physics and Astronomy of the Russian Academy of Sciences awarded him the title of Corresponding Member (in Condensed Matter Physics). At the same time, he took over the leadership of the Research Center "Space Materials Science" at the institute.

Since 2005, Mikhail Kovalchuk has taken another very responsible director's position. The Kurchatov Institute accepted him as head of the Center for Synchronous Radiation. And in 2007, he was entrusted with acting as vice president of the Russianacademy of sciences. However, Mikhail Kovalchuk could not fully enter this position, because he was not a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. And most of the academicians refused to accept him as full members, considering him more of a manager than a scientist.

RAS reform

Instead, in 2012, he was entrusted with the duties of dean at the Faculty of Physics of St. Petersburg State University, therefore, he had to work at three outstanding institutes at once, located also in different cities. It ended with the fact that in 2013 a secret ballot twice denied him the position that had belonged to him for the past fifteen years - Mikhail Kovalchuk was not re-elected director of the Institute of Crystallography.

After that, a bill appeared, the authorship of which many scientists attribute to the offended Kovalchuk. The Russian Academy of Sciences has undergone a rigorous reformation. Mikhail Kovalchuk himself did not deny involvement, telling the press that the Academy of Sciences must inevitably perish, just as the Roman Empire perished.

2015

This year, Mikhail Kovalchuk had a lot of public speeches, the most interesting of which was in the Federation Council, where he talked about how a new subspecies of a person is being created in the United States - "official man", what dangers are fraught with the use of artificial cells and how the United States influences the scientific and technological goals set by the rest of the world. The science of Europe and Russia suffers especially from their interference. Scientific collaboration betweencountries, according to Mikhail Kovalchuk, should be gradually curtailed and joint projects not started.

In December, following this speech, Putin met with Mikhail Kovalchuk. There he learned that Academician E. Velikhov, President of the National Research Center "Kurchatov Institute", was becoming an honorary president. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin appointed Mikhail Kovalchuk to this vacant position. Kovalchuk immediately proposed the creation of a new generation fusion reactor. The beginning of 2016 brought new meetings between the President of the Russian Federation and the President of the Kurchatov Institute, where the search for organizations capable of controlling the flow of thought was discussed.

More posts

There are only seventeen important, really loud-sounding posts belonging to Mikhail Kovalchuk. This is for the most part membership in presidiums and commissions - in the Council under the President of the Russian Federation (science and education; modernization and technological development of the Russian economy; high technologies and innovations, and so on), in boards - of the Ministry of Industry of the Russian Federation, the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation; in the council of chief and general designers, leading specialists and scientists - the area of high-tech sectors in the economy; in the Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation.

Scientific leadership also occupies a large place on this list: the MIPT faculty (this legendary institution will be discussed separately), dealing with nano-, bio-, cognitive and information technologies; Department of Physics of Nanosystems, Moscow State University, Department of Nuclear Physics Research Methods, St. Petersburg State University; Department of Physics of Radiation Interaction, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology; taught as a professor atFaculty of Materials Science, Moscow State University. He is the Deputy Chairman of the Commission of the Russian Academy of Sciences, which deals with nanotechnology.

Also

Mikhail Kovalchuk works as editor-in-chief of "Crystallography", an academic journal, and deputy editor-in-chief of a scientific journal with the long title "Surface. X-ray Research". Mikhail Kovalchuk's popular science television program on Channel Five is called "Stories from the Future".

He is the Chairman of the National Committee of Crystallographers of the Russian Federation; RSNE; NKRK. He is also a member of the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science), in the physics section.

Scientific activity

Most scientists of the Academy of Sciences consider Kovalchuk an established great scientist in terms of X-ray diffraction analysis, but neither created new sciences nor contributed to other sciences. And pompous statements about the Galilean magnitude of discoveries in the field of many sciences such as management, economics, pedagogy, political science, biology, racial theory and history (oh, how interesting the decoding of the Russian human genome is here!) Are just banal nonsense that scientists consider weaknesses of an outstanding personality, and not at all Nazism or Lysenkoism.

With all these shortcomings, scientists of the Russian Academy of Sciences consider Mikhail Kovalchuk the most sensible and decent person of all the leaders of Russian sciences. They also say that the reform on their territory was carried out by completely different people who, with his proposals, did notwere guided, but the conflict between Kovalchuk and the Russian Academy of Sciences was taken advantage of comprehensively.

ITEP

Scientists at the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics are sounding the alarm: they are protesting against the transfer of their native institution under the auspices of the Kurchatov Institute and under the leadership of Mikhail Kovalchuk. In 2012, the Save ITEF website was even created, where letters were posted to all Russian politicians, the Prime Minister and the President. More than a thousand scientists signed them, including a third of the Institute's scientific staff. The petition was signed even by Nobel laureates from America, who consider ITEP one of the world's leading institutions.

Their letter says that this act is tantamount to closing NASA in the US and the Max Planck Institute in Germany. This is the scale of this institute - ITEP, founded for nuclear research in 1945, which operated as part of Rosatom. In addition to him, two more leading scientific research institutes in the field of biology and physics joined the Kurchatov Institute. Scientists see the purpose of such a merger as a claim to create an alternative to the Russian Academy of Sciences due to the fact that Mikhail Kovalchuk failed to become an academician. And it is impossible to head the Academy of Sciences without this title.

Another point of view

The press service did not really comment on the situation in connection with the scandal around the Kurchatov Institute, referring to the fact that by consolidating the country's authorities not only want to gain sustainable modernization, but also achieve a technological breakthrough in one or several areas at once. So far, the collected information does not provide Mikhail Kovalchuk with the titlesuccessful manager. He draws bright prospects, moreover, huge ones, especially in terms of nanotechnologies and hybrid anthropomorphic systems (robots).

Research is being done, but incredible results are not expected in this life, maybe in the next. The objective information by which the effectiveness of scientific work is judged is the number of publications. The budget of the Kurchatov Institute in 2012 alone exceeded seven billion rubles, now, of course, more. Nevertheless, in terms of the number of publications, it is significantly inferior to many universities and a number of research institutes. Moreover, this figure has dropped dramatically during Kovalchuk's leadership of the Kurchatov Institute.