A.W. Addison: Summary of Fall 2009 Trip to Ukraine.
In September 2009, assisted by contributions from the Chemistry Department and the Office of International Programs, I travelled to Kiev, Ukraine, to visit the Pisarzhevskii Institute of Physical Chemistry of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine for about ten days. There is a formal research collaboration agreement between the Pisarzhevskii Institute and our College of Arts & Sciences. My collaborator there is Deputy Director Dr. Vitaly V. Pavlishchuk, a Corresponding Member of the National Academy.
While there, I gave two seminars – a more formal one for the Institute, attended also by Inorganic Chemistry faculty and students from Shevchenko State University of Kiev, plus an ‘informal’ one, to the Inorganic researchers of the Institute.
I met with subgroups of the Institute’s Inorganic researchers, and also individually for detailed discussions with research staff and Ph.D. students of the Institute, as well as with one or two Ph.D. students associated solely with the University. Most of the students are first-rate, as they are selected from the best baccalaureate graduates of places such as Shevchenko State University, where the curriculum is quite rigorous. Consequently, I am encouraging our department to recruit these folks into our Ph.D. program. On the other hand, these Ukrainian institutions are hardly well-endowed with the range of modern instrumentation that is vital for contemporary research in Chemistry.
We spent a fair portion of the time working on drafts of a couple of manuscripts, and we have just had the revised version of one of these accepted for publication in The European Journal of Inorganic Chemistry[1].
My collaborators also presented an outline of these results at a conference in France in October[2] and we’ve submitted an abstract on related nanoporous metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) for the 240th American Chemical Society National Meeting in Boston. The Pisarzhevskii Institute has an interesting history, going back to its founding under the remarkable polymath Lev Pisarzhevskii in 1927. It has a small archive or museum room, in which I noted prior director Brodsky’s autographed copy of Linus Pauling’s famous book, “The Nature of the Chemical Bond”[3], as well as paintings by Pisarzhevskii.
Pauling was hardly a stranger to cold-war politics, and politics is always in full swing in Ukraine. While I was there, I saw a vigil at the Lenin statue downtown and intense “western-style” advertising for the (unsuccessful !) presidential campaign of Arseny Yatsenyuk. Meanwhile, then-President Viktor Yushchenko was frequently apparent, as in the typical picture below of him driving down Khreshchatyk Boulevard, one of the main drags of Kiev, at speed in his black VW van.
Of course, Kiev and the surrounding area have a long and fascinating history, which is another matter ........
Dr. Anthony Addison
[1] A. V. Pavlishchuk, S. V. Kolotilov,* M. Zeller, L. K. Thompson, I. O. Fritsky, A. W. Addison* and A. D. Hunter, “A triple-decker heptadecanuclear (CuII)15(CrIII)2 complex assembled from pentanuclear metallacrowns.”
[2] A.V. Pavlishchuk*, S.V. Kolotilov, M. Zeller, O. V. Shvets, L. K. Thompson, I. O. Fritsky, & A. W. Addison, “Magnetic and Sorption Properties of Polynuclear Complexes Based on Pentacopper Metallacrown Unit”. Fifth International Symposium on Molecular Materials: Electronics, Photonics and Spintronics, Université de Rennes-1, Rennes, France, October 2009.
[3] Pauling is one of four people who have won two Nobel Prizes: in Chemistry(1954) and in Peace (1962).
