Faculty Spotlight: Igor Adamovich
Where is your hometown?
I grew up in Yalta, a small resort city on the coast of Black Sea in Ukraine, (which was a part of the Soviet Union back then). In 1945 (before my time), it was a place of a key meeting between the Allied powers that shaped the future of Europe after World War Two.
What is your field and what made you pursue it?
In short, plasmas. They come in many shapes and sizes, and they can mean different things to different people. In aerospace engineering, air plasmas are encountered in high-speed (hypersonic) flight, such as during the atmospheric reentry. Other engineering applications include high-power gas lasers, materials processing for microelectronics, high-speed flow control, plasma-assisted ignition, and plasma-enhanced catalysis for energy-efficient fuel conversion and CO2 remediation. I was attracted to this field because it employs the advances of modern physics and chemistry to make new breakthroughs in engineering.
What brought you to Ohio State?
An opportunity to live in a free society and a chance to work with people who were smarter than I was. I was very fortunate to meet great mentors and brilliant colleagues at Ohio State, and to learn a great deal from them.
What is the focus of your research and why is it significant?
We are trying to understand the inner workings of plasmas and the mechanisms of their effect on high-speed reacting flows, without perturbing them. We use lasers as non-invasive tools, and spectroscopy as a means of precise analysis. There can be no effective engineering applications of plasmas without us understanding what they do and how they do it.
Why should a prospective student consider your field?
Hypersonic aerodynamics and propulsion, energy-efficient chemical conversion and processing of new materials, and development of non-invasive insight into high-speed reacting flows are rapidly emerging fields. They will pose new technical challenges and call for competent and creative people to meet them.
What do you like most about your job?
Finding and uncovering the hidden order in the complexity of apparent chaos. As one of my colleagues once said, “It’s amazing what you may see, if you know how to look”. After 30 years in research, I am still learning of new ways of looking at things.
What advice would you give students considering a career in engineering?
Most technological marvels developed over the last century – a car, an airplane, a spaceship, a laser, and a computer, to name just a few – are the fruit of work of engineers. Becoming an engineer takes quite a bit of work in the classroom and in the lab, but your ideas may have an enormous impact on our lives. I cannot think of a better career than this.
What is one of your favorite hobbies outside of being a professor and researcher?
Art, history, literature, and music (if they count as one).
