Voevodskii, Vladislav

Born July 12 (25), 1917, in Petrograd; died Feb. 20, 1967, in Novosibirsk. Soviet physical chemist. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1964; corresponding member, 1958). Member of the CPSU from 1964.

On graduating from the Leningrad Polytechnical Institute in 1940, Voevodskii worked at the Institute of Chemical Physics of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. From 1946 to 1952 he worked in the subdepartment of chemical kinetics at Moscow State University and from 1953 to 1961, at the Moscow Physicotechnical Institute. In 1961 he became dean of the department of natural sciences at the University of Novosibirsk. A student of N. N. Semenov and V. N. Kondrat’ev, Voevodskii worked out a number of major problems in the theory of the oxidation of hydrogen as well as the first quantitative theory of the cracking of olefin hydrocarbons. He substantially developed the concepts of the nature and mechanism of heterogeneous catalytic processes. The principal direction of Voevodskii’s scientific work from 1955 in the Institute of Chemical Physics and the Institute of Chemical Kinetics and Combustion in Novosibirsk (of which Voevodskii was one of the organizers as well as assistant director from 1958) was investigation of the structure, properties, and reactions of free radicals in various chemical processes with the aid of microwave spectroscopy. These studies led to the establishment of a Soviet school of chemical microwave spectroscopy.

Voevodskii was editor of the journal Strukturnaia khimiia and a member of the editorial board of the journal Kinetika i kataliz. He was posthumously awarded the State Prize of the USSR in 1968.