Scientists in Russia struggle in a world transformed by its war with Ukraine

Related podcast The state of Russian science, and improving implantable bioelectronics BY Sarah Crespi , Olga Dobrovidova Yuri Kovalev remembers how some of his older colleagues took offense when he moved to the United States in 2003 to take a postdoc position at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. He could have stayed in Russia where he got his Ph.D., at the Lebedev Physical Institute, one of the country’s oldest and most prestigious science centers. Why would he ever want to leave? “But for me it felt really natural as we were now part of a bigger world,” he says. Yet Kovalev returned a few years later, drawn by the power and potential of science in his home country. He rejoined Lebedev to work on RadioAstron, an international project that linked radio dishes in the U.S. and elsewhere with an orbiting Russian satellite to create a giant virtual telescope. With the system, Kovalev and his colleagues created some of astronomy’s highest resolution images, including ultrasharp pictures of the jets shot out from supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies. Kovalev was also encouraged by growing Russian R&D spending, which at about 1.2% of gross domestic product was half of rich-world levels but far higher than during the tumultuous 1990s. Russian scientists were retooling their labs,...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news