Yakov Alpert with CCS Co-chair Joel Liebowitz
Yakov Alpert, a pioneer in serveral fields of radio and space plasma physics, died on October 17, 2010 in Boston at the age of 99. Alpert participated in Sputnik I and many other Soviet satellite projects in the 1960s and 1970s.
He became a Russian refusenik when he applied for an exit visa in 1975. Like all dissident scientists in the U.S.S.R., he lost his job and the right to work in his field. In the 1980s, he hosted the officially banned “Refusenik Scientific Seminars” in Moscow, where many well-known dissident scientists and mathematicians, including Victor Brailovsky, Alexander Lerner, Yuri Orlov, Anatoly Sharansky and Andrei Sakharov met to discuss scientific advancements in their fields.
CCS played a crucial role in supporting members of the unofficial weekly science seminars that Yakov Alpert held in his apartment in Moscow in the 1980s. Members of CCS regularly visited him during this time. They provided him and other members of the group with moral and material support. By publicizing the seminar in the West, CCS helped prevent the Soviet regime from closing the group and persecuting its members.
In 1987, Dr. Alpert arrived in the United States, and settled in Boston, working at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He never formally retired.
Download a pdf about Dr. Alpert.
Learn More
Dr. Alpert”s Biography,Wikipedia
A review of his autobiography Making Waves, American Scientist