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The Russian invasion of Ukraine has killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of people. It has destroyed property, damaged vital infrastructure, and brought grief and despair to millions of people. It also made the work of Ukrainian scientists in their home country virtually impossible.

The difficulties encountered by Ukrainian scientists are best exemplified by the following concluding paragraph from a paper by Dr. Oleg Usatenko (Usikov Institute of Radiophysics and Electronics, Kharkiv, Ukraine), which was posted in March of 2022 on a public internet platform: “The author of this work apologizes to readers for the fact that the manuscript is made public unfinished. The author of this work is not sure about the possibility of its completion, as he is in a place under continuous artillery shelling and bombing.” This paragraph sent shock waves through the world scientific community.

UF physicists and engineers decided to act quickly. Prof. Dmitrii Maslov from Physics established a phone and email contact with Oleg Usatenko. In the meantime, the co-Directors of the multi-disciplinary Quantum Theory Project Profs. Hai-Ping Cheng (Physics) and Richard Hennig (Materials Science and Engineering) found a way to sponsor the visit of Dr. Usatenko for a year. The Office of Provost and College of Engineering have also contributed funds to the cause.

Shortly after the sponsorship was secured, Dr. Usatenko and his family left Ukraine for Warsaw, Poland, where they applied for U.S. visas. Eventually, Dr. Usatenko and his wife Iryna arrived in Gainesville at the beginning of July of 2022. For the first month, they stayed at Prof. Peter Hirschfeld’s (Physics) home and then moved to their own place. A team of volunteers, consisting of faculty, post-docs, staff members, and graduate students, helped Oleg and Iryna with various aspects of their settling down in Gainesville.

While at UF, Dr. Usatenko continued his studies of complex systems which made his name internationally recognizable. He also started a new project with Prof. Maslov on the effect of the magnetic field on the resistivity of disordered systems. In his words: “The entire world knows about the horrors that happened in Ukraine. I hope that you can understand my gratitude to all people who assisted me in arriving and working at Gainesville.”