Director of the Joint Institute RAS Academician Grigory Trubnikov congratulates Scientific Leader of the Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions JINR RAS Academician Yuri Oganessian on his 90th anniversary.

“Yuri Tsolakovich Oganessian is undoubtedly our national and world treasure, a man who is gifted with talents, intelligence, and fantastic scientific intuition in choosing the direction of scientific research. Academician Oganessian knows how to lead huge armies of scientists. He is a real commander in science. He sees the goal and knows how to achieve it. In his wide community, Yuri Tsolakovich manages to find just the right people for each unique experiment who will carry it out with him. This includes partners not only from Dubna, but also from China, France, Germany, Japan, and the USA.

Yuri Tsolakovich is both a simple man and a celestial being. When he considers a scientific problem, there are no authorities for him. He discusses it with everyone from whom he can learn something, hear something new. He becomes a celestial being when he is absolutely sure which path to take and how to follow it. Here he takes over the leadership and leads people, the Laboratory with his personal example, charisma, willingness to take risks, a certain audacity and achieves the result. The same was in the 60s and 70s, when he worked with Igor Kurchatov and Georgy Flerov. In the 70s and 80s, he worked with employees of the Curie Institute, a Nobel laureate Glenn Seaborg, unique scientists from Germany and Japan, winners of world scientific prizes. He has lived in several epochs, and he is lucky to have not only talent and intuition, but also an active, long life in science. Yuri Tsolakovich is indeed a very happy man, because he has achieved what he dreamed of as a student, as a young scientist, and has seen the results of his work. I am sure that there is still a lot of interesting, bright things ahead of him.

The largest Periodic Table in Eurasia, located in Dubna on the bank of the Volga River, has several grey empty cells. I believe that Yuri Tsolakovich “left” them for himself, his experiments and tasks, his colleagues. We are incredibly lucky to be contemporaries of this great scientist, an outstanding Russian and Armenian citizen, an international, supranational person.

Dear Yuri Tsolakovich! On behalf of the entire Dubna, the whole scientific world, all your colleagues and friends, I want to sincerely and most cordially congratulate you on a beautiful anniversary marking your ninetieth orbit around the Sun. We deeply admire your talents, elements, achievements, history, and your future. I am sure that as long as this good feeling lives in us, we keep you in good shape, which means we can count on new discoveries and new victories. Happy birthday, Yuri Tsolakovich!”

Director of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research
RAS Academician Grigory Trubnikov