Alex Shikov Unexpectedly Passed Away

October 30, 2013 (PO22). Professor Alex Shikov unexpectedly passed away on October 26, 2013. Alexander Konstantinovich Shikov was born in Norilsk (then USSR) in 1948. He graduated from the Moscow Steel and Alloys Institute in 1971 and started his scientific career as a junior research associate at the Bochvar Institute of Inorganic Materials, also in 1971. He received his D.Sc. (Habilitation) degree in 1991. Since 1998, Dr. Shikov served as the deputy director of Bochvar Institute, and from March to August 2009 as its Head. &He was then appointed as the Executive Director of Kurchatov Institute's center for Nano-Bio-Info-Cognitive (NBIC) Science and Technology. Memorial ceremonies were held on October 30, 2013, in Kurchatov Culture Center.

Shikov made an outstanding contribution to restoration of production of superconducting materials after the collapse of Soviet Union. Due to his scientific and management talents, Russian conductors for ITER are today competitive or even exceed the highest performance requirements. While at Kurchatov Institute, he directed research into superconducting materials for ITER and initiated production of HTS materials. Prof. Shikov was an author of three monographs, 250 papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals and 60 patents. He held a Chair of the Applied Superconductivity division in the Moscow Institute of Engineering Physics (Moscow’s outstanding Technical University).

Prof. Shikov was awarded several State Prizes in the field of science and engineering, an award of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the gold and silver medals of the International Exhibition of Inventions. He was a member of the Academy of Electro-technical Sciences of the Russian Federation. He also received an International Cryogenic Materials Conference Best Paper Award at the meeting in Tucson, Arizona in July 2009.

The memory about this outstanding man will be carried not only by his conductors with non-decaying currents and will last. All who knew him will remember his energy, motivation, optimism and achievements.

(Obituary based in part on that published in the Russian website “Superconductors in Power Industry”; see Superconductors in Power Industry, in Russian. Readers in Russian can find there some additional reading on and by Shikov.)