Valerii Vinokour

Valerii Vinokur (also spelled as Vinokour, or Valery Vinokour; 26 April 1949 — 16 December 2025 ) was a condensed matter physicist who worked on superconductivity, the physics of vortices, disordered media and glasses, nonequilibrium physics of dissipative systems, quantum phase transitions, quantum thermodynamics, and topological quantum matter. He was a senior scientist and Argonne Distinguished Fellow at Argonne National Laboratory and a senior scientist at the Consortium for Advanced Science and Engineering, Office of Research and National Laboratories, The University of Chicago. He was a Foreign Member of the National Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Career

Vinokur earned his BSc in physics of metals at Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys in 1972 and moved to the Institute of Solid State Physics, Chernogolovka, Russia, where he received a Ph.D. in physics in 1979. He has held appointments as a visiting scientist at CNRS, Grenoble (1987), a visiting scientist at Leiden University (1989), a visiting scientist at ETH (Zurich) (1990), and as visiting director of research at Ecole Normale Superieure (Paris) (1996). Since 1990 till January 2021 Vinokur has worked at the Argonne National Laboratory, having become a Distinguished Argonne Fellow in 2009. University of Chicago Distinguished Performance Award, 1998 , 2003 Alexander von Humboldt Research Award, 2003 Foreign Member of the Norwegian National Academy of Letters and Science, 2013 Alexander von Humboldt Research Award, 2013 International Abrikosov Prize, 2017 Fritz London Memorial Prize, 2020