July 25, 2022
Funding for Roman Poberezhnyuk
The Philipp Schwartz Initiative for Researchers at Risk is supporting the FIAS visiting scientist Dr. Roman Poberezhnyuk with an 18-month scholarship beginning 1 August 2022.
The theoretical physicist from Kiev, who holds a doctorate, was caught unprepared by the war against his home country while on holiday in Spain. As he had already spent several months as a visiting scholar at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS), he immediately found support and accommodation here. He initially received temporary fellowships from the Stiftung Polytechnische Gesellschaft and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The funding now granted as a Schwartz Fellow is also a recognition of his research achievements. Poberezhnyuk has been working for years with researchers from Prof. Horst Stöcker's group at FIAS to understand the thermodynamic properties of dense elementary matter.
FIAS has been cooperating with Ukrainian scientists for many years, as documented by several joint publications. Horst Stöcker was recently awarded an honorary doctorate from the Bogolyubov Institute of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in Kiev for this longstanding, productive collaboration.
The Philipp Schwartz Initiative goes back to the Austrian pathologist Philipp Schwartz, who lost his professorship in Frankfurt in 1933 due to his Jewish faith. He emigrated to Switzerland and founded the "Emergency Society of German Scholars Abroad". Under his name, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the German Federal Foreign Office continue this work by enabling academics in danger in their home countries to work at German institutes.
Poberezhnyuk receives a fixed sum for the sponsorship period of 18 months; in addition, the host institution is supported with 20,000 EUR. An extension to 24 months is possible. "We are very pleased that this dedicated scientist - also thanks to the active support of Goethe University - can continue to work at FIAS and that his research, as well as FIAS's commitment to now seven Ukrainian researchers, is thus recognised," says FIAS Director Eckhard Elsen.
