By Michelle Nery

Anatoly Radyushkin, professor of physics and senior scientist at Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, has been named a Virginia Outstanding Scientist of 2004. He is one of only three recipients of this year’s honors. The awards, given by the Science Museum of Virginia and the Office of the Governor, honors scientists who have made a recent contribution to basic scientific research extending the boundaries of any field of science.

“Anatoly Radyushkin is a world-class scientist in our world-class physics department. Through his eyes we have a glimpse of the innermost workings of nature,” said Provost Thomas L. Isenhour.

Radyushkin is an internationally recognized nuclear theorist and a pioneer in the development of generalized parton distributions. GPDs are a set of mathematical functions that have allowed physicists for the first time to obtain a three-dimensional snapshot of the inner structure of the particles that make up the nucleus of the atom. This work is giving scientists a glimpse of the structure and dynamics of the basic building blocks of matter.

“GPDs allow scientists to use an accelerator to get the effective resolution power of an electron microscope and an X-ray installation,” said Radyushkin.

This work has opened a new field of scientific investigation that allows the measurement of the properties of protons and the comparison of these measurements with theoretical predictions.

Radyushkin is the third Old Dominion professor to be named a Virginia Outstanding Scientist. Cynthia Jones, eminent scholar and professor of ocean, earth and atmospheric sciences, was named an Outstanding Scientist in 2003 and Daniel Sonenshine, professor emeritus of biological sciences, was honored in 1994.

Radyushkin, a recipient of the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Research Award in 2001, completed his predoctoral work at Moscow State University in the Russian Federation and received his Ph.D. in physics there in 1978. He is a permanent staff member of the Laboratory of Theoretical Physics in Dubna, Russia. He came to Virginia in 1991 as a visiting senior scientist at Jefferson Lab, which is funded by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. Since 1992, he has split his time as a full professor of physics at ODU and senior staff scientist at Jefferson Lab.

He is the author or co-author of 90 journal articles in his field, which have been referenced in more than 4,400 other publications. He was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society in 1996.