Pulat Khabibullaev

Pulat Kirgizbaevich Khabibullaev was born on 14 October 1936 on the V. I. Lenin collective farm in the Asaka district of the Andijan region. His father was Kirgizbay Khabibullaev; his mother, Soliyakhon Tashlanova, ran a collective farm. In 1960 he graduated from the physics faculty of Central Asian State University.

He took the degree of Candidate of Physical and Mathematical Sciences in Moscow in 1964 and later became a Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences in Novosibirsk. His main fields were acoustic spectroscopy, the physics of soft matter and superionic conductors, nonlinear optics, nuclear physics and the physical chemistry of isotopes.

He worked at the Tashkent State Pedagogical Institute (head of the general physics department in 1958–1960), then at the Andijan Cotton Institute, of which he was rector in 1972–1975. In 1975–1978 he headed the science and educational institutions department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan; in 1978 he became vice-president of the Academy of Sciences of the Uzbek SSR and director of its Institute of Nuclear Physics.

He was elected an academician in 1984 (and a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences the same year) and headed the Uzbek SSR’s Academy of Sciences in 1984–1988. He was chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Uzbek SSR in 1985–1988, then chairman of its Presidium in 1988–1989 and deputy chairman of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet; he sat in the 11th convocation of the USSR Supreme Soviet.

From 1989 he led the thermophysics department of the Academy of Sciences. He chaired a committee on international affairs in 1990–1994, the State Committee for Science and Technology in 1994–2002, and directed the Centre for Science and Technologies under the Cabinet of Ministers in 2002–2006. He was editor-in-chief of the Uzbek Physical Journal and wrote more than 500 scientific papers and 15 monographs.

In 1978 he was named Honoured Scientist and Technologist of the Uzbek SSR and in 1987 he received the Uzbek SSR State Prize named after Beruni; he held two Orders of the Red Banner of Labour, the Badge of Honour and, in independent Uzbekistan, the Order “Mehnat shuhrati”. He twice won the gold medal of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

Pulat Khabibullaev died in Tashkent on 7 February 2010.