By SUSAN JONES
Ukrainian physicist Kseniia Minakova is adamant about one thing — she is not leaving her native country even though her lab at National Technical University Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute was destroyed in a bombing in August 2022.
But she did tour the United States last month — including a stop at Pitt — to meet with research collaborators and solicit support for her projects and those of others facing severe challenges during Ukraine’s war with Russia.
“For me and my group, it's really important to work in Ukraine,” Minakova said. “We perform work in Ukraine and have some collaboration with colleagues from different parts of the world. We want to stay. My laboratory it's all my life.”
Minakova was working on a project with Denys Bondar, a Ukraine native and assistant professor in the Tulane University Department of Physics and Engineering Physics, when her lab was hit by Russian bombs.
Kharkiv, a city of nearly 1.5 million that sits just 19 miles from the Russian border, came under heavy bombardment during the early days of the war, but the city never fell out of Ukrainian control. During the worst days of the bombings, the Russian army had moved to within three to six miles of Kharkiv; now they are closer to 30 miles away.
At night during those attacks, Minakova said she worked in a bathroom, so no lights would shine out of the building. The bombings were happening three times a day, on a pretty regular schedule, she said, at 4 p.m., midnight and 5:05 a.m. There are still some attacks now, but usually only three or four a month.
Minakova was not in the building when it was hit, although a night security guard was killed. Afterward, she and her colleagues tried to salvage what they could from the wreckage, including vacuum machines, some electronics and chemistry lab equipment. Although she admitted that much of the equipment she was working with was “from a previous century. It’s equipment from Soviet Union.”
After the bombing, her colleague at Tulane, Denys Bondar, wrote a post about her plight on LinkedIn. Several news outlets contacted her after that, including Nature, which wrote an article in February about how she and other scientists were continuing to work under difficult conditions.
Since then, “a lot of people in the world have helped me,” she said, including sending their old equipment and some measurements samples, and inviting her to give online lectures.
Bondar put Minakova in touch with Sergey Frolov, a professor in Pitt’s Department of Astronomy & Physics and also a native of Ukraine, because of her interest in quantum science and working with the Pittsburgh Quantum Institute, of which Frolov is a member.
Frolov, who hosted Minakova’s visit to Pitt, said several University centers including the Petersen Institute of NanoScience and Engineering, the Pittsburgh Particle Physics Astrophysics and Cosmology Center, the Quantum Institute and the physics department have “established collaborations with Ukrainian scientists currently in Ukraine, through the Universities for Ukraine initiative, and supported these with $30,000 that went directly to Ukraine for researchers to be able to continue their work in the fields of physics, nanotechnology, materials science.”
See related story: Ukrainian scholars and others finding a helping hand at Pitt
The two and Bondar are now working together to put together the Kharkiv Quantum Center, “to unify and promote quantum research in the technologically advanced city in northern Ukraine,” Frolov said.
He wanted to bring Minakova to Pitt, because “I thought she could teach our students and our faculty, a great deal about how to teach and do research under the extreme conditions of war and bombings.”
Minakova continues to do research in a much smaller former storage room at her university in Kharkiv. She was able to rebuild some vacuum technology, which is key to her and her colleagues’ research. As the weather gets colder, she said the university can only afford to heat five of its 20 buildings. There also are scheduled blackouts for a few hours at a time, which she said is better than the sudden blackouts last year that could last for three days.
She and others have been trying to use their scientific and engineering skills to make improvements. The school has collected a photovolcaic thermal system that they hope will help heat water in the buildings. They also took some LED lamps that ran on 220 volts and converted them to work on 5 volt powerbanks, to provide light during the blackouts.
All of her students are now online, and she’s become inventive about how she shows them experiments and how to do calculations. This often involves several electronic devices — phones, laptops, computers — scattered around the lab. She said the pandemic, at least, had prepared them for working online.
The equipment she’s received from Tulane and other places is older, but still better than what she had before the bombing. She said salaries for scientists in Ukraine are about the same as “the people who clean the street.” What they need most from scientists outside the country are collaborators and grants. They have the knowledge and the brain power to make scientific breakthroughs but not the possibility to get experience on good equipment.
She said several of her female colleagues have left Ukraine or moved to areas further from the fighting. For her to come to the U.S. wasn’t easy. She had to apply for a visa three times. Her male colleagues, between the ages of 18 to 60, can’t leave Ukraine because they might be called into military service.
Her 3.5 week trip here, which included a visit to Tulane, was sponsored by the Optica (formerly Optica Society of America). She was recognized as a 2023 Optica ambassador at their annual conference.
Susan Jones is editor of the University Times. Reach her at suejones@pitt.edu or 724-244-4042.
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