Valery Godyak

Valery Godyak (born June 8, 1941 in Chernivtsi ) is a Russian-American physicist who deals with plasma physics.

Godyak received his diploma in physical electronics from the Leningrad University of Technology in 1964 and his doctorate in plasma physics from Lomonosov University in Moscow in 1968. In 1964 he became an assistant professor at the Radio University in Ryazan and from 1968 he was in the laboratory for fusion energy at the Institute for Electrophysical Apparatus in Leningrad, where he worked on relativistic electron beams, electron optics and accelerator physics. In 1972 he went to the Lomonossow as a group leader for gas discharges with radio waves. In 1980 he was released for political reasons and worked in temporary jobs, for example as an electrician in a Moscow hospital. In 1984 he went to the USA and became a scientist at GTE Corporation (a subsidiary of Bell Telephone Company), after Osram took over the lamp division in 1993 at Osram Sylvania.

As a scientist, he made fundamental contributions to electromagnetic wave-induced discharges in plasmas and related non-linear phenomena. As an industrial physicist , he developed induction lamps such as the Endura (Icetron / Endura) lamp and received prizes from Osram Sylvania and Siemens, for example. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the IEEE . In 2004 he and Noah Hershkowitz received the James Clerk Maxwell Prize for plasma physics .

Web links

• Biography at the APS
• To receive the Maxwell Prize