In the course of celebrating Andrei Sakharov’s centennial in Russia in 2021, his granddaughter Marina joined forces with prominent Russian and foreign scientists to create an endowed physics scholarship in Sakharov’s name, supporting talented young scientists at two universities with deep ties to his career as a physicist: the Physics Department at MGU, Sakharov’s alma mater, and MIPT, where he served as a professor in the 1960s.
This year, the Andrei Sakharov Science Endowment Fund — a Russia-registered endowment — will appoint its sixth cohort of Sakharov Scholars at MIPT (Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology), one of Russia’s leading universities. Sixteen students pursuing MSc and PhD degrees in fields spanning Sakharov’s own broad scientific interests will receive Sakharov scholarships of 60,000 rubles a month (roughly US$700,totaling some US$8,400 annually.)
Candidates are selected each early autumn by a faculty committee at MIPT, using criteria developed jointly by the Fund and the university. Among the Sakharov Scholars each year are PhD students conducting their research at the Theoretical Department of FIAN, the Lebedev Physics Institute — the very institution where Sakharov earned his PhD in 1947 under Nobel laureate Igor Tamm. It was from FIAN that colleagues including Nobel laureate Vitaly Ginzburg and Kavli laureate Andrei Linde set out on their monthly visits to Sakharov during his exile in Gorky, and it was to FIAN that Sakharov returned the very next day after Mikhail Gorbachev freed him in December 1986.