Tatiana Birshtein, an outstanding Russian scientist, world-famous for her seminal contributions to contemporary statistical physics of macromolecules, passed away on the 24th of February 2022
Tatiana Birshtein was born in Leningrad (nowadays Saint Petersburg). She was a secondary school student during the Siege of Leningrad and helped to defend her city as a nurse in a military hospital. For that, she was awarded the medal “For the defence of Leningrad”. In 1951 Tatiana Birshtein graduated from Physics Department of the Leningrad State University. After accomplishing in 1958 her PhD thesis under the supervision of Professor M.V. Volkenstein in the theoretical physics department of the Leningrad Pedagogical Institute, she has joined the Institute of Macromolecular Compounds of the Russian Academy of Sciences. She also held a position of Professor in the Physics Department of the Saint Petersburg State University.
During more than six decades, her works were constantly at the cutting edge of theoretical physics of polymers, and to great extent promoted the progress in theoretical and experimental polymer science worldwide.
The works of Tatiana Birshtein in 1950-1970s laid the foundation for conformational statistics of macromolecules and theory of intramolecular conformational transitions in polymers and biopolymers, based on the rotational isomeric model suggested by M.V. Volkenstein and on the originally developed transfer matrix formalism. This series of works has established systematic relationships between increasingly complex chemical structure and conformational and mechanical properties of individual macromolecules. Later on, she applied this approach to study adsorption of individual macromolecules at surfaces of different geometries and coupling of intramolecular conformational and adsorption order-disorder transitions. Together with O.B. Ptitsyn she published in 1964 a classical book “Conformations of macromolecules” that is considered as one of the foundation stones in contemporary polymer science (the English version of this book was published in 1966).
Starting from 1980s Tatiana Birshtein developed and applied mean field and scaling theoretical approaches to study polymer systems with complex architectures, such as solutions of branched macromolecules, self-organized supramolecular structures of block copolymers, polymer and polyelectrolyte brushes, etc., as well as coil-to-globule conformational transition in individual macromolecules and polymer brushes.
Together with M.V. Volkenstein, O.B. Ptitsyn, and Yu.Ya. Gotlib, she has founded and for many decades led the St. Petersburg school of theoretical polymer physics that is considered to be one of the leading centres of expertise in this domain worldwide. A few generations of researchers trained in this school are working nowadays in Russia and many other countries.
For many decades Tatiana Birshtein was one of the most active and bright members of polymer scientific community, a regular participant of the most representative conferences, a member of expert councils and editorial boards of scientific journals
Tatiana Birshtein has established and run an extended network of international collaborations with a number of leading polymer research groups in France, Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland and Czech Republic. As a principal investigator representing Russia team, she participated in many international projects, including the European Commission Framework Programmes.
She has started and for many years organized the international symposium “Order and Mobility in Polymer Systems” that regularly attracted most famous polymer scientists from all over the world for more than two decades.
For her outstanding and internationally recognized scientific achievements, Tatiana Birshtein was awarded the L’Oréal-UNESCO prize “For Women in Science” in 2007, and the Kargin prize of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2008.