ST. BONAVENTURE, N.Y. — Nuclear engineer Alexander Sich, Ph.D., was the first Westerner permitted to live and work within the exclusion zone to investigate the Chernobyl accident in the former Soviet Union 25 years ago.
Now an associate professor of physics at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio, Sich will visit St. Bonaventure University Oct. 19 to give a presentation on “The Nuclear Crisis of Fukushima, Japan, and the Comparisons to Chernobyl.”
The program, free and open to the public, will begin at 7 p.m. in Dresser Auditorium of the John J. Murphy Professional Building on campus.
Sich is responsible for many of the physics-based courses at Franciscan University, but he continues to be an active researcher/consultant in the area of nuclear sciences. His career has taken him from a lab technician at Los Alamos Laboratories to a program director for the Department of Energy working in the Ukraine.
Sich was most notably a program manager for operations and safety in the Chernobyl Shelter Implementation Plan. It was his involvement with the aftermath of Chernobyl that propelled him into the educational arena.
He also has an impressive presentation and publication record, including the publication of science columns in the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek and The Diplomat, and several articles in the scientific journal Nuclear Engineering International. He has presented on the topic of science education to a number of academic organizations and honors societies.
Sich holds a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and did his undergraduate work in nuclear engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He holds two master’s degrees; one in Aristotelian-Thomistic Philosophy of Nature from Holy Apostles College & Seminary, and a second in Soviet studies from Harvard University.
Sich’s visit is sponsored by St. Bonaventure’s Clare College, Department of Physics, and Franciscan Center for Social Concern.
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