Dear Colleagues and Students,
I am writing to share the sad news that Stanislav Sazykin, an associate research professor of physics and astronomy who was highly respected in his field of space science, died suddenly on May 3 at 49.
Stan joined Rice in 2000 as a postdoctoral researcher and rose quickly to associate research professor.
After completing bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, he came to the United States in 1993 as an exchange student as part of the Bush-Gorbachev Exchange Program. He earned an additional bachelor’s degree and a Ph.D. from Utah State University under the direction of Bela Fejer.
At Utah State, he initially worked on equatorial and low-latitude thermospheric winds, but later shifted to theoretical studies of the penetration of magnetospheric electric fields in the ionosphere under the guidance of Fejer, as well as Richard Wolf and Robert Spiro at Rice.
As a graduate student, Stan reprogrammed most of the Rice Convection Model (RCM) of the Earth’s inner magnetosphere. At Rice, he led the continued development and use of the RCM, extending its usefulness by participating in multiple code-coupling projects with other large-scale models.
Stan also played an important role in the development of the Space Weather Modeling Framework, a University of Michigan-led effort that, coupled with the RCM, continues to provide a comprehensive picture of the space environment near Earth for commercial, government and private customers.
He was a member of Rice’s committee on faculty and staff benefits and served for seven years on the Faculty Senate, where he helped develop policies for research and teaching professors.
Wolf, a professor emeritus and research professor of physics and astronomy at Rice, described Stan as “a distinguished computational physicist and a well-established and highly respected member of the space plasma physics community” in an obituary in Rice News. He said Stan “was one of the smartest people any of us had ever encountered” and that he was “particularly adept at finding weak points in arguments, which put him in high demand as a reviewer.”
Stan is survived by his wife, Ying, and three sons, Andrew, Logan and Victor, and will be greatly missed by the Rice community.
Stan is one of seven long-term members of the Rice community we’ve lost during the past month. Chandler Davidson, a longtime professor in the School of Social Sciences and one of the nation’s leading experts on voting rights, died April 10. Charles Sidney Burrus, a pioneer in digital signal processing, the Maxfield and Oshman Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Computer Engineering, former dean of engineering and a member of the Rice University faculty for 56 years, died April 3. Rex McLellan, professor emeritus of materials science and nanoengineering, passed away April 21. Professor Emeritus Reggie Dufour, a member of the Physics and Astronomy Department and a key contributor to galactic astronomy research, died April 26. Anita Kiperman, a longtime lecturer in the old Hispanic and Classical Studies Department, passed away April 11. Linda McNeil, of the Center for Education died April 1.
Respectfully,
Reginald DesRoches, Provost