People: Top Physicist From Former Soviet Union Moves To University Of California, Irvine - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences

Igor E. Dzyaloshinskii, former head of Moscow's Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics, has been appointed a professor in the department of physics at the University of California, Irvine. Dzyaloshinskii, 61, was a student of Lev Landau, considered a father of modern science in the former Soviet Union. He headed the Landau Institute, named for his mentor, from 1965 until 1991. His areas of research specialization include magnetism, liquid crystals, and high-temperature superconductivity. According to the Philadelphia-based Institute for Scientific Information, Dzyaloshinskii is listed as the first author of 17 papers that have been cited 50 or more times. His most-cited recent paper is "Neutral Fermions in Paramagnetic Insulators" (Physics Letters A, 127:112-4, 1988), which had been cited 125 times by the end of 1991. While Dzyaloshinskii says he intends to stay at UC-Irvine until he retires, he notes that "I did not emigrate at all; I just accepted a permanent position here," adding that he intends to apply for permanent residence in, but not citizenship of, the United States. Before he obtained his appointment at UC-Irvine, Dzyaloshinskii had several visiting appointments at U.S. institutions. In 1990, he served as a visiting professor at Harvard University and a visiting scientist at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, Calif. Last year, he was a visiting scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory and a distinguished visiting professor at the University of Houston. According to Walter Bron, chairman of the physics department at UC-Ir-vine, Nobel Prize-winning physicists J. Robert Schrieffer (1972) and Philip...