This award is named in memory of Dr. Vladimir Belsky, who came to Rensselaer from Russia in the 1990’s and performed research in computational mechanics as a postdoctoral fellow for three years.
Four awards of up to $500 each are made every year to graduate students in the School of Engineering to support research activities in computational science and engineering (i.e. travel, materials, supplies, conference fees, etc.).
Memories of Dr. Belsky (1958-2020)
“I met Vladimir in August 1992 at a conference where he presented an impressive poster on his shape optimization research in Moscow. A few months later I offered him a post-doctoral position at RPI, and I remember the December day he arrived very well. We had the highest snowfall ever recorded when he appeared at my doorstep with two suitcases full of books. I suggested he stay with us until the weather cleared, but in a short instant my family fell in love with this kind and thoughtful gentleman, and we enjoyed hosting him for several months until his family arrived.
Vladimir and I collaborated on various multigrid-like methods, and I enjoyed working with such a brilliant individual. In just over two years we co-authored 14 journal articles and won the best American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) paper award. One of the highlights of our collaboration was the development of the aggregation-based multigrid, which was so efficient that we co-founded Finite Element Oriented Solver (FEOS). This was almost 30 years ago, and as it turned out, this solver was well ahead of its time, as now a variant of this exact solver is considered to be the best iterative solver in the market.”
– Jacob Fish, Former Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Vladimir loved nothing more than spending hours working on an interesting problem with his colleagues. RPI gave him an opportunity to pursue his research and enabled our family to immigrate to the US. We know he would be happy that his fund offers that opportunity to other early-career scientists in his field.”
– Irene and Natalie Belsky, Wife and Daughter of Dr. Vladimir Belsky