A new exhibition dedicated to Ukrainian scientists has opened at Harvard Science Centre in the Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the US.
The exhibition – Freedom in the Equation – shares the stories of 10 scientists to highlight Ukraine’s lost scientific potential due to Russia’s aggression towards the country while also shedding light on the contributions of Ukrainian scientists.
Among them are physicists Vasyl Kladko and Lev Shubnikov. Kladko worked on semiconductor physics and was deputy director of the Institute of Semiconductor Physics in Kyiv. He was killed in 2022 at the age of 65 as he tried to help his family flee Russia’s invasion.
Shubnikov, meanwhile, established a cryogenic lab at the Ukrainian Institute of Physics and Technology in Kharkiv (now known as the Kharkiv Institute of Physics and Technology) in the early 1930s. In 1937, Shubnikov was arrested during Stalin’s regime and accused of espionage and was executed shortly after.
The scientists were selected by Oleksii Boldyrev, a molecular biologist and founder of the online platform myscience.ua, together with Krystyna Semeryn, a literary scholar and publicist.
The portraits were created by Niklas Elemehed, who is the official artist of the Nobel prize, with the text compiled by Olesia Pavlyshyn, editor-in-chief at the Ukrainian popular-science outlet Kunsht.
The exhibition, which is part of the Science at Risk project, runs until 10 March. “Today, I witness scientists being killed, and preserving their names has become a continuation of my work in historical research and a continuation of resistance against violence toward Ukrainian science,” says Boldyrev.
